July 2021 Summaries

The CARTO Spatial Extension for Snowflake brings native spatial analytics capabilities to the cloud data warehouse, enhancing performance and convenience through parallelization and direct integration with BI tools. The extension is distributed as a set of User Defined Functions (UDFs) that extend Snowflake's capabilities for geospatial analysis, providing support for spatial indexes, measurements, and advanced functions like Voronoi diagrams and great circle calculations. With seamless access to location data on the Snowflake Data Marketplace, users can leverage the full power of Spatial SQL to analyze and visualize geospatial data in a cloud-native environment. The extension is available as an open-source release under a BSD license, with advanced capabilities requiring a subscription to the CARTO platform.

CKDelta has partnered with CARTO to provide human mobility data, which is now available in CARTO's Data Observatory. This partnership aims to enhance location intelligence use-cases by offering consistent and comparable data across multiple countries, processed in a standardized form. CKDelta's diverse datasets are being used to analyze various industries, including marketing, retail, and urban planning, providing insights through historical and real-time data from their global portfolio of businesses. The human mobility data is anonymized, aggregated, and extrapolated to represent the overall population in each country, fulfilling national and international data privacy regulations. The Footfall dataset provides aggregate measurements of visitors to an area, including dwell times and age ranges, while the Catchment Areas dataset breaks down visitors by their origin, both available for multiple countries including the UK, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.

CARTO is returning to in-person and hybrid events after a year of virtual events, including Data & Analytics Metro New York & London 2021, Home Delivery World 2021, Supply Chain & Logistics Conference, Groceryshop 2021, INTERGEO 2021, Retail Week Live, Geospatial World Forum, ODSC West Reconnect, and GEO Business 2021. CARTO will attend both Data & Analytics Metro events, sponsor the New York event, exhibit at the London event, and be a gold sponsor of Home Delivery World 2021. These events cover various topics including data analytics, spatial analysis, supply chain logistics, retail, geospatial information, and AI in data science. CARTO aims to support attendees' most pressing analytical use cases using its power of spatial analysis and connect with them at these events.

The workshop "Towards building fair and inclusive human mobility models" was held by CARTO's Data team, Scientific Committee, and industry partners to discuss issues involving human mobility data. The discussion focused on biases in the underlying data, methods for measuring and correcting these biases, and improving the usability of associated data products. Biases can have real effects on people, companies, and planners, and there is an ongoing debate about how this data should be gathered and used in a way that protects privacy. Industry participants agreed that bias compensation is a top priority and shared various approaches for alleviating biases, including optimizing panel design, pre-stratification, post-stratification, machine learning models, and leveraging complementary data. The workshop aimed to convene a broader conversation between academia and industry players, regulators, and administrations to address these issues and find ways to generate aggregated metrics that provide value to society without compromising individual privacy.

The Data Appeal Company has partnered with CARTO to make their POI & Sentiment Data available in the Data Observatory. This partnership enables users of CARTO's platform to leverage high-quality sentiment data from various providers and sources, enhancing spatial analysis and decision-making in sectors such as CPG, Hospitality, Retail, and Real Estate. The combined Places and Sentiment data provide competitive market intelligence, location insights, and business profiling, allowing users to better understand customer perceptions and behaviors. With this partnership, CARTO users can now access a wealth of information on POI details, online sentiment, reviews, and ratings, enabling them to enrich their CRM information, assess site popularity, and optimize supply chain management.

I was fascinated by an article in the New York Times that highlighted how city trees are more likely to exist in wealthier neighborhoods, and I wanted to explore this issue using spatial analysis. I built a demo application using Google Cloud BigQuery and CARTO's BigQuery Spatial Extension to create a tree equity index for approximately 6,000 census block groups in New York City. The index score is based on the number of trees and tree width within each block group, with weights assigned to these features to prioritize quantity over size. I used two SQL queries to generate this index score: one for calculating ACS and street tree data per block group, and another for creating the custom tree index score by standardizing the features using a machine learning preprocessing function, summing them together, capping outliers, and calculating a 0-100 index score. The resulting dashboard shows the tree scores for each census block group, as well as a correlation exploration between the tree scores and median income and racial demographics. The analysis reveals a weak positive correlation between median income and abundance of trees, but no strong correlations with major racial demographics.

The latest developments at CARTO aim to simplify the process of creating spatial solutions and accelerating the spatial app development cycle by leveraging the capabilities of cloud data warehouses. The company has introduced a simplified tileset creation tool, known as BigQuery Tiler, which offers developers a unique set of tools to extract meaningful location-based insights from massive spatial datasets hosted in Google's BigQuery. This tool simplifies the steps required to create dynamic geospatial applications and visualizes large spatial datasets with unparalleled processing capabilities. The BigQuery Tiler optimizes configuration and implements smart memory management techniques, removing previous friction in the tileset creation process. With this enhancement, CARTO continues to streamline the access and visualization of spatial data, enabling Location Intelligence natively in the cloud.

The Spatial Data Science Conference, SDSC21, is an upcoming event where experts from across the globe will gather to discuss the latest advancements in spatial analytics. The conference aims to bring together businesses and organizations that need location-based insights to adapt to the changing world. The organizers are seeking speakers who can share their spatial stories, innovative techniques, and best practices for gathering location-based insights. With a diverse mix of speakers from various cultural backgrounds and disciplines, SDSC21 will provide a platform for experts to exchange ideas and gain insights from industry leaders such as Google Cloud, Fulcrum, TomTom, Unacast, SafeGraph, OmniSci, and SingleStore. The conference has grown exponentially over the years, with thousands of spatial enthusiasts attending the virtual event last year, and this year's edition promises to be just as exciting.

This article discusses the use of z-scores in geospatial analytics to measure and rank locations. It explains how to calculate an index score by standardizing features, weighting variables, capping values, compiling variables, and yielding a final score that can be easily interpreted by business users. The article also explores advanced visualization techniques using BigQuery and CARTOframes, allowing for the creation of heat maps and interactive maps that provide valuable insights into location-based data. By following the steps outlined in this article, data scientists and analysts can simplify the process of measuring and ranking locations, providing actionable insights to inform business decisions.

The Spatial Data Science in Telecoms & Utilities Summit is an upcoming event that brings together analytics professionals using geospatial data for various use cases such as network planning, data monetization, and site selection. The event aims to discuss the new types of geospatial data and modelling being used in the industry, enabling adaptation to changing consumer behavior. Thought leaders from leading Telecoms and Utilities brands will share their insights on topics like renewables, electric vehicles, 5G connectivity, and IoT. Previous speakers include experts from prominent companies such as BT, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Telefonica, Skyhook, Vodafone, GHD, Origin Energy, Urbint, and EDP Solar.