Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammeiam | Hacker News Reader

Funded by Google, uses MapBox

I like the idea that universities can take money from corporations and not feel as though they have to bend their work to support their funder's business models. Kudos to Google and the University of Maryland here.

I suppose the level of influence depends on the institution and the degree of corporate support. I’ve been involved in research where PIs were fiercely emphatic about their unwillingness to share findings to funders prior to publication.

That said, this isn’t classic research / journal pub work, and so presumably Google could decide they didn’t like the direction and yank funding or threaten to yank funding.

To be clear, the funding here is via a Google Faculty Research Award, which is a one-time payment largely focused on supporting one grad student for one year.

https://research.google.com/research-outreach.html#/research...

Google is typically fairly hands off with these awards and we have not, at anytime, felt pressure to pursue a certain direction because of Google funding (though of course, there may be implicit biases that we are unaware of). Most of our funding is via the NSF.

Project Sidewalk is quite dependent on Google Streetview and its API. I don't believe there is a good alternative out there currently (Mapillary is a possibility; Cyclomedia is another but they work via private contracts, which would likely be prohibitively expensive for us). So, if Google decides to end Streetview or significantly change its API, then it will dramatically impact Project Sidewalk's viability. Our hope is that Streetview only becomes more robust and updated more frequently, which will make it an even more valuable "urban science" dataset.

Here's a Diamondback article about "Project Sidewalk" from the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab hackerspace. (HCIL alum here -- go Terps! ;)

http://www.dbknews.com/2016/10/14/university-of-maryland-app...

A UMD team made an app highlighting D.C. areas inaccessible to people with disabilities.

Jon Froehlich, center, the lead researcher for Project Sidewalk, and his two graduate students Soheil Behnezhad, left, and Manaswi Saha, right.

http://hcil.umd.edu/

http://terp.umd.edu/step-inside-a-hackerspace/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com