Mayor Ben Walsh was at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies on Wednesday as winners were announced for a competition that encouraged people to brainstorm ways to improve city snow plow services.

The competition, called a “hackathon,” was based on a dump of data related to snow plow operations, said Sam Edelstein, Syracuse’s chief data officer. Edelstein, along with Walsh, attended a brief press conference Wednesday at the iSchool, alongside Dean Elizabeth Liddy.

“The projects were really impressive. We’re excited to do more and to implement these ideas so that we can use them in the future,” said Edelstein, an SU alumnus.

The hackathon was held in partnership between the city, iSchool and AT&T.

Liddy said 36 teams, with 90 participants, registered as part of the competition. Sixteen of those teams submitted their final projects for review, the dean said.

Dean Olin, a Camillus resident, and Alex Sinfarosa of Ithaca won first place in the competition. The duo designed a way for Syracuse to view real-time updates on what city roads were plowed and the amount of time elapsed since those roads were last plowed, Edelstein said.

“Basically we did a timelapse map,” Olin said. “The colors of the roads change, depending on how long it has been since a plow has been (there). So it gives you a visual idea of … ‘Oh, this neighborhood always goes last, they always seem to be red.’”

Olin graduated from Cornell University in December with a bachelor’s degree in information science, he said. Sinfarosa did not attend the event. Olin said he met Sinfarosa in Ithaca.

In total, Olin said he spent about 40 hours on the project. Sinfarosa spent about 25 hours, he added.

Snow removal has become a hot-button topic in Syracuse since Walsh was inaugurated in January. The mayor hosted a “snow safety summit” in February after Syracuse.com reported residents were forced to walk in streets due to unshoveled sidewalks.

Syracuse is known as one of the snowiest cities in the United States. It has received almost 125 inches of snow throughout the 2017-18 snow season, according to goldensnowball.com. The Golden Snowball Award is a competition among upstate New York cities, including Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse over who receives the most snow in a given year.

Michael Phillips, a master’s student studying computational linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, received second place in the competition for creating a project that would allow residents to “easily search” what streets were plowed and at what time.

A group of iSchool graduate students won third place: Suchitra Deekshitula, Anish Nair, Ashmin Swain, Rahul Sarkhel and Shikhar Agrawal. The team designed a optimization algorithm for snow plow trucks.

The snow plow competition was Syracuse’s second “hackathon” event partnership. Last year, the competition focused on city infrastructure improvements.

Since taking office, Walsh has expressed a willingness to partner with local universities and has spoken at both SU and Le Moyne College. In January, he said the city would work with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs to host a “Fiscal Summit” in hopes of identifying ways of addressing the city’s multimillion-dollar deficit.

Walsh, who wore a small SU pin on his suit coat Wednesday, received a master’s degree in public administration from Maxwell in 2005.

“In every decision we make, we are trying to make data-driven decisions,” the mayor said of city policy. “We were thrilled with that participation level this year. We look forward to doing it again next year.”

Published on March 7, 2018 at 9:41 pm

Contact Sam: sfogozal@syr.edu | @SamOgozalek