Following up on our previous article posted in March Tamas Budavari uses Big Data Astronomy Research Methods to fight Urban Decay, the JHU Mathematician was once again recognized in the Baltimore Sun for the use of his research in helping the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development identify dangerous vacant houses. From the Sun article:

“Tamas Budavari, an expert in cosmology and galaxy evolution, joined the city housing department to map abandoned buildings and predict future blight to help officials figure out where to intervene before a property became vacant.

When a house fell and killed a man in West Baltimore last year and four others crumbled amid powerful wind gusts, Budavari immediately responded to help the city identify which of Baltimore’s thousands of vacants were in imminent risk of collapsing. He and researchers mined city databases to assess risk factors: the height of a building, whether the roof was missing and the number of years vacant. The data helped the city identify more than 300 houses that needed to be torn down right away.”

The article also goes on to mention how Dr. Budavari and the rest of the initiative’s work is being shared with officials from cities such as Kansas City and New Orleans to fight similar problems. The initiative’s director, Ben Seigel, says the program “is designed to bring together Hopkins students and faculty, government officials, policymakers, philanthropists, activists and others to talk about the problems, solutions and the potential to harness big data analytics.” A symposium is being planned for December 2017.