M. Scott Brauer Hackathon

Sarah Hugenberger, a Masters student in geographic information systems at Salem State University works on a tool that can determine whether a voting district had racially polarized voting during an election. Doug Spencer (left) discusses a tool that measures racially polarized voting with Rosemary Fasselin (right). Spencer is a professor at University of Connecticut's law school, while Fasselin is a geographic information systems expert. Megan Gall oversees a hackathon during a week-long conference on gerrymandering at Tufts University. As the in-house social scientist at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Gall crunches the numbers that underpin the committee's voting rights cases. Nick Doiron, 28, builds a tool called District Genius, which allows experts to annotate Congressional district maps and explain why they're drawn the way they are. Justin Solomon (red plaid right) runs the hackathon alongside Assaf Bar-Natan (left), a PhD student, who interns for the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group. John Casellas Connors, a post-doctoral associate at Boston University, works on building a computing library to calculate the compactness of voting districts. Alex Loewi, 31, of Baltimore, Maryland (standing) looks on as Hugenberger and Fasselin work on their tool that measures racially polarized voting. Richard Barnes, of Berkeley, Calif., (left) and John Casellas Connors, of Somerville, Mass., work together at the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) hackathon at the Data Lab in the Tisch Library at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, USA, on Thurs., Aug. 10, 2017. Barnes is a Ph.D. student in Computational Science at University of California, Berkeley. Connors is a post-doctoral associate at Boston University at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The two were working on a programming library for computing compactness measures of voting districts. The hackathon is part of the first in a series of Geometry of Redistricting workshops put on by the MGGG. Academics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) professionals, and legal professionals worked together to build tools useful in analyzing voting district data around the country. Justin Solomon is the organizer of the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) hackathon and an Assistant Professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He is seen here at the Data Lab in the Tisch Library at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, USA, on Thurs., Aug. 10, 2017. The hackathon is part of the first in a series of Geometry of Redistricting workshops put on by the MGGG. Academics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) professionals, and legal professionals worked together to build tools useful in analyzing voting district data around the country.