Vanessa Burgett's Contact Details

Vanessa Burgett's Company Details

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: The Smart, Healthy Communities Initiative

Champaign, Illinois, United States • 4 Employees
Information Technology & Services

Technology has given us the information to make our world better. We're just not using it well. Because we're not working together.Smart, Healthy Communities is an interdisciplinary initiative based at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. We are specialists in science and computing, design and the humanities. Together, we're working to realize the promise of the information age: Not just better tools, but a better world.We create secure and equitable ways of bringing people, data and technology together for the betterment of human lives.Our work is in three areas. First, we develop and promote Rokwire, an open-source mobile software platform intended to support the smart communities of tomorrow. Rokwire is a privacy-focused, inclusion-oriented development tool that reduces the cost and time to develop mobile applications by about 75%. It allows for integration of diverse streams of information and the access of that information in more human-centered ways.Second, we also support the use of the UIUC community as a proving ground for smart community development. Most tech efforts are developed in private "test beds," test environments where prototypes are tried and tuned for real-world launch. But private test beds are inadequate for community efforts. Our campus of 60,000 diverse individuals spread over 10 square miles is proving a more powerful way to learn what works at city scale for minimal investment.Third, we help researchers unlock the potential of anonymous research data generated by our efforts. With tens of thousands of individual users and millions of discrete experiences, our software is already offering opportunities to explore and understand the human experience more deeply.How does mental health correlate with life circumstances? Which design decisions best encourage the safe use of public spaces? How do we make technology more inclusive?