City Innovation Group is founded on the belief that
multi-disciplinary interactions lead to richer thinking
and greater innovation...

To get the best results for the needs of our clients we bring together a diverse group of expert consultants in computer science, urban planning and design, data mining, graphic and interaction design, architecture, sociology, policy making and mechanical and electrical engineering to implement ideas which will support the future growth of cities, businesses and communities.

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Christine Outram
Director, City Innovation Group
Christine is fascinated by improving city life through facilitating human-to-human and human-computer interactions. Her research and practice lies at the intersection of urban informatics, civic strategy and community mobilization. In addition to directing City Innovation Group, she was until recently, a research associate at the SENSEable City Lab, MIT  where she orchestrated the 'The Copenhagen Wheel' project - a wheel that turns ordinary bikes into electric hybrids with regeneration and real-time environmental sensing capabilities.
Christine received her SMArchS Architecture and Urbanism degree at MIT and her Architecture degree in Sydney, Australia. She has practiced in both architectural and urban design offices. In her spare time, she hikes, loves finding new places to eat, and rides her bike.
For more information see www.christineoutram.weebly.com

Francisca Rojas
Francisca is an urban planner and researcher whose main interest is understanding the way that new information and communications technologies (ICTs) coalesce with the way our cities function.
She is a postdoctoral fellow with the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, investigating transparency initiatives in transit systems and federal spending.
Previously, Francisca worked as a researcher at MIT's Senseable City Lab and as an urban planner in Washington DC and Santiago, Chile. She has degree in social science from the University of Michigan, a masters in city planning from MIT, and a PhD in urban and regional planning, also from MIT. Current inspirations include civic innovators, open source planners, and Patti Smith, the original Jersey-girl. 

Adam Pruden
Adam’s greatest passion is floating media. From fireworks to flying LEDs, he is exploring the vast possibilities of airborne communication. As a Research Fellow for MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Adam oversees Flyfire – a project that aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. Adam uses his passion of data visualization, media theory and graphical storytelling by supporting projects that explore spatial and pervasive media and sensor technologies.

Before joining MIT, Adam graduated from Ball State University in Indiana with a B.A. in Architecture and an acute interest in comprehending the real meaning of an architect in today's global society. To gain a greater understanding of a connected world and build upon a cross-disciplinary design foundation, Adam moved to New York City and received his M.S. in Visual Communications and Digital Design at Pratt Institute.

Adam has worked in both architecture and graphic design firms, and shared his research and projects at AIGA, TED and Oslo Lux.

Jase Wilson
Jase has a masters of City Design and Development from MIT and is the owner and director of Luminopolis, a business that crafts useful, elegant websites and social networks for communities and businesses of all types and sizes.
He is passionate about cities and how web 2.0 services can be used to improve quality of life.

Xiaoji Chen
Xiaoji Chen is a graduate student of SMArchS program in Design and Computation at MIT. She received bachelor and master’s degrees in architecture and has a strong background in computer science. She is currently a research assistant with MIT's Senseable City Lab.
Xiaoji's research interest is the impact of emerging technologies and distributed computing on city forms and human behavior. Her recent projects focus on (1)the role of data visualization in understanding massive urban data in transportation, communication, environment and health; (2)the impact of data visualization on mental models and public behavioral pattern. Some of her projects at Senseable City Lab include: the data visualizations for the Copenhagen Wheel project, redrawing UK borderlines from human networks and Live Singapore.

Claire Abrahamse
Claire is passionate about creating better spaces for contemporary urban living while acknowledging the retention of old building fabric and urban patterns as an essential “ingredient” in creating human-scaled, layered, multivalent and vibrant urban places in developing cities today. 

Her architecture, urban design and heritage practice in Cape Town, South Africa, continually tries to balance the demands of urban and architectural conservation with the real needs of African urban citizens in the 21st Century.  If heritage significance is achieved through public consensus regarding the past associations and present regard for a site, Claire is interested in the ways in which different readings of significance and usefulness might be taken across the contemporary urban landscape and amplified through design intervention.

Claire received an architectural degree from the University of Cape Town, and completed the SMArchS Urbanism degree at MIT.

 

Kyla Fullenwider
Kyla Fullenwider creates projects that engage communities, both place-based and online. She has directed and curated public art projects with the City of New York, pop-up community centers with GOOD, and street food adventures with UCLA's Department of Urban Planning. A recent project, City R+D, brought together over 200 urban thinkers from across the country to re-imagine and plot the future of their cities. Kyla directs the Public Studio, writes the Walking Distance column for GOOD, and serves on the board of CicLAvia. She is a graduate of Harvard University and hails from the fine state of Kentucky.

Vincenzo Manzoni
Vincenzo has a Bachelor and masters degree in Computer Engineering from Università degli Studi di Bergamo and is a former visiting researcher at MIT's SENSEable City Lab where he focused on intelligent transportation systems. He has worked as software developer for IMTeam Srl (Villa D'Almè, Italy), designing and developing web services for Geographical Information Systems and embedded systems for remote monitoring and in addition to being a City Innovation Group lab member is now a lead researcher at Tenaris.

Andres Sevstuk
Andres is  a Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Studies & Planning at MIT. He studied at L'École d'Architecture de la Ville & des Territoires (BArch) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SMArchS, Ph.D) and has worked as an architect, urban designer, consultant and researcher in Estonia, France and the United States. While at MIT, he has led projects like Real Time Rome, Digital Water Walls, Graz Mobile Landscapes, and iSpots at the SENSEable City Lab, and been a long term member of the Smart Cities Group at the MIT Media Lab. His current research investigates the influence of both city form and technology on the social, economic and environmental performance of cities using state of the art spatial analysis tools. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on urban design, urban technology, and spatial analysis. For more information on his work and publications, see cityform.net

Luca Simeone
Luca teaches design anthropology and interaction design at La Sapienza University and Ateneo Impresa Graduate Business School in Rome. He has published books, reviews and articles on design anthropology and ethnographic methods applied to design practices and architecture. In 2009 he founded FakePress, a think tank exploring the future of publishing. He is also the founder and user experience director of Vianet, an interaction design agency based in Rome, Toronto and Doha and works as independent expert for the European Commission and for the German Aerospace Center. He recently edited the books Beyond Ethnographic Writing (Armando, 2010) and REFF: The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment (DeriveApprodi, 2010). In 2011 he was a research affiliate with the SENSEable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge MA.

Max Kanter
Max is a recent graduate of Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he studied geography and geographic information systems. Max has a passion for fresh, affordable, healthy food, and encompasses a can-do energy that supports our mission at Food Forward. While in Vermont, he founded and organized the town of Middlebury’s first community garden, bringing together property owners, local organizations, student volunteers, and master gardeners to cultivate a sustainable community garden. Max also coordinated youth theater arts programing in Santiago, Chile while working with Voluntarios de La Esperanza. Aside from working at places like Food Forward in LA, Max likes to spend his time speaking Portuguese and Spanish, exploring cities, hiking, and theater-going.

Daniele Quercia
Daniele is passionate about mining data to answer multidisciplinary research questions. From urban informatics to personality studies, he is exploring the complex relationship between our offline and online worlds. As Horizon Researcher at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, he works on a grand challenge that aims to transform our digital footprints into real-world services. His research lies at the intersection of data mining, social computing, urban informatics, and computational social science. He writes about mobile 2.0 research and industry on the group's blog. He also speaks at top-tier conferences (such as ICDM, Ubicomp, CSCW, WSDM) about how our digital footprints will help us address big societal issues. Before starting to work in Cambridge (UK), he lived in Cambridge (USA) where he was Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked on social networks in a city context. Before joining MIT, Daniele received his PhD from University College London, and his thesis was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science. During his PhD, he was a Microsoft Research PhD Scholar and MBA Technology Fellow of London Business School. To understand the meaning of being a computer scientist in today's global society, he interned at the National Research Council in Barcelona and at National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo and, before that, he studied at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and University of Illinois (USA).