OSCUR

Open-Source Cyberinfrastructure for Urban Computing

Advancing urban research through cutting-edge AI, machine learning, and data visualization technologies. Transforming how cities understand, analyze, and optimize urban environments.

Research Focus Areas

Tackling critical challenges in urban computing through innovative approaches

The complexity involved in creating, sharing, and re-using experiments and analyses

We will deploy a cloud-based, open collaborative environment that supports the use of OSCUR over large and diverse urban datasets (e.g., spatiotemporal, geometry, image). This will make it easy for users to quickly create analyses that are reproducible by design, and that can be debugged, shared, and extended. Drawing upon our prior experience in building computational reproducibility tools, we will also integrate systematic provenance capture into the tools and libraries available in OSCUR, enabling reproducibility even for analyses carried out outside the cloud environment.

The difficulty involved in finding relevant data among the troves of available datasets

While there are many datasets available, they are distributed over many repositories and come in different formats and granularities. Besides, most repositories provide search interfaces that are limited to keyword-based queries or simple faceted searches over the dataset metadata. These are insufficient to express information needs that often arise in analytics and modeling, e.g., find data that can enrich analyses, improve a predictive model, or explain outliers in a dataset. We will create a dataset search engine for urban data that supports data-driven and data relationship queries. By enriching the context of the datasets with the analyses, models, and publications that use them, we will support the FAIR principles for urban data.

Fragmented community

A key objective of our project is to grow and strengthen a cohesive community around urban computing. We have already assembled a diverse team of 50+ researchers and collaborators that cover several geographical areas in the US and abroad, have expertise in different disciplines, and represent multiple groups of stakeholders. They will use and contribute to the infrastructure. Combined with a concerted outreach effort, our project will have a broad reach.

OSCUR Ecosystem
Integrated Research Ecosystem

Connecting data, algorithms, and insights

Our Partners

Collaborating with leading institutions and organizations worldwide

OSCUR Partners

Strategic Collaborations

Expertise Domains
Data Science & Analytics
Visualization & HCI
Urban Engineering
Policy & Security
Global Reach

Our collaborative network spans major metropolitan areas including NYC, Chicago, and Seattle, with research partners across multiple continents bringing diverse perspectives to urban computing challenges.

50+ Researchers Global Network Multiple Institutions
Impact Areas

From open-source software development to collaborations with city agencies, our partners drive innovation in sustainable urban infrastructure, transportation systems, and public health analytics.

Latest Updates

Stay informed about our latest research breakthroughs and community initiatives

Urban computing to get a boost with new open-source platform funded by the National Science Foundation
Oct 2025

Urban computing to get a boost with new open-source platform funded by the National Science Foundation

A research team led by Professor Claudio Silva and the Visualization Imaging and Data Analytics Research Center (VIDA) at NYU Tandon School of …

UIC researchers join national project to turn urban data into healthier cities
Oct 2025

UIC researchers join national project to turn urban data into healthier cities

The past decade has seen a flood of data about cities, information with the potential to make communities cleaner, healthier and more livable. …

Research Software Engineer position at UIC
Oct 2025

Research Software Engineer position at UIC

The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago is seeking a research software engineer with expertise in handling large datasets, …