Projects

The Community Capitals project seeks to explore the relationship between community capital indicators and the overall condition of communities in Iowa, aiming to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and gaps within these communities. The main work focuses on major events such as natural disasters, job losses, new job creation, school closures, and new opportunities for tourism and healthcare. The study seeks to identify the most relevant community capitals, trends over time, and the impact on community resiliency, by analyzing correlations between various indicators and comparing quantitative data with some qualitative insights.

Despite the recognized importance of STEM initiatives, there remains a lack of comprehensive and actionable data on the availability and distribution of STEM resources within Iowa communities. It is unclear how extensive these resources are and how effectively they can be mobilized to support STEM education development. Additionally, a deeper understanding is needed of the factors influencing students’ decisions to pursue STEM education in Iowa, such as access to local job opportunities, educational infrastructure, participation in science fairs, and extracurricular programs. This project seeks to address these gaps by developing a centralized, user-friendly data repository along with visualization tools that present clear and contextual information. These resources will serve Iowa’s policymakers, educators, advocates, and community stakeholders by informing strategic decisions, guiding investments, and supporting targeted policy interventions to strengthen STEM education throughout the state.

The Housing and AI project team built a tool to help bring Artificial Intelligence to housing and community development with the goal of making the most up-to-date data available and easily accessible for housing and communities to make better-informed decisions. The tool makes use of a large language model to help answer different questions about housing and community problems, backed by the data. It would potentially help community planners, builders, and policymakers involved in housing and community development.

The Community Capitals project explored the relationship between community capital indicators and the overall condition of communities in Iowa, aiming to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and gaps within these communities. The main work focused on major events such as natural disasters, job losses, new job creation, school closures, and new opportunities for tourism and healthcare. The study sought to identify the most relevant community capitals, trends over time, and the impact on community resiliency by analyzing correlations between various indicators and comparing quantitative data with some qualitative insights.

The lowa Zoning Guide project is a comprehensive, interactive mapping effort that displays housing-related zoning regulations by district for 327 lowa cities. The project collected and analyzed data on several socioeconomic factors influencing housing in these cities. Our website developers then used the data to build the Online Guide to lowa Zoning map, providing comprehensive insight into the factors affecting the production and preservation of housing across lowa.

The absence of a comprehensive assessment of housing quality in rural areas of Iowa hinders resource allocation and negatively impacts residents' well-being and economic growth. Evaluating existing housing conditions is subjective and lacks thorough investigations due to limited resources. To address these challenges, an AI-driven approach was proposed. By utilizing web scraping and AI models, housing features could be categorized as good or poor quality, enabling targeted investment strategies, and directing financial resources where they are most needed. This project aimed to eliminate biases, streamline housing evaluations, and inform decision-making for rural housing investment and development initiatives.

This project focused on enhancing local food markets by providing valuable insights and optimizing the crop flow. It involved creating a comprehensive map showcasing the prices of eggs and bacon across counties, developing web-scraping spiders for data collection, and demonstrating their effectiveness with a specific crop example. Additionally, the project aimed to optimize the crop flow from supply to demand, maximizing overall profit through AI algorithms that consider factors like transportation costs.

This DSPG project aimed to develop a tool to provide its users with information on opening, inheriting, and operating a grocery store in their preferred rural location. The DSPGGrocery package, which hosts the calculations for the project, is hosted on an R Shiny application to perform dynamic calculations based on user-given input to estimate revenues and costs for opening a grocery store in a particular location.

The DSPG Summer 2023 students worked on a collaborative project as part of the education and outreach component of DSPG. This project partnered with Council of Governments (CoGs), serving selected communities to provide on-the-ground data in neighborhoods to accurately assess and map community infrastructure features in order to identify multiple projects appropriate for CDBG infrastructure funding. DSPG students utilized map collection technologies (smartphones and Global Positioning Systems app) to inventory neighborhood infrastructure and overlay this site-level data with other community attributes as part of the deliverable for this project.

This project formed as a need to aid beginner farmers in making the right choices for their farming practices through an interactive application. Through research on specialty crops, soil information and climate data, the project aims to display pertinent farming factors in relation to one another to provide feasible options for beginning farmers. Using leaflet and Tableau, created a dashboard that would dynamically update information to match location and specialty crop information. We hope that this project serves as the foundation for getting farmers setup on their next farming journey.