Few of the students gathered at the podium at the front of the General Assembly classroom had any prior experience as first responders to a hurricane — but despite that, they clicked through slides outlining innovative, data-driven ways to respond to one. Through a collaboration between General Assembly and New Light Technologies (NLT), each of three groups was tasked with developing a tool aimed at saving the most lives in the event of a catastrophic storm, using cutting-edge data science and spatial analysis. The presentation was the capstone of their twelve-week immersive program in data science and visualization, with the geographic lens NLT brings to all its work.
General Assembly is a school focused on developing students' technical and coding skills — offering everything from one-day workshops to full-time programs in data science, web development, and user-experience design. Its classes are structured for people from all walks of life, whether pivoting into a new career or deepening expertise in an existing one.
General Assembly's immersive Data Science class showcased its two-week capstone project to a room of instructors and industry leaders — the final leg of a rigorous, concentrated training program requiring 480 hours of in-seat instruction and lab time. (For comparison, a master's program comprises about 460 hours.)
NLT, a contractor that works closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) providing GIS and IT services, analytics, and remote sensing analysis, provided the students with real questions facing its GIS work in emergency preparedness and response. "We challenged the students to find innovative solutions that would help disaster-support agencies know, in a timely manner, the location of people who need help, and the communities not connected to electricity or unable to access medical care," said NLT's Remote Sensing Scientist and Senior Consultant of the partnership with General Assembly.
The groups presented on three distinct topics: leveraging social media to map disasters; using live feeds to determine road closures during an emergency; and extracting building values from Zillow to estimate property damage during a storm. One group ran nearly 10,000 tweets through an algorithm that performed sentiment analysis on each, then spatially visualized urgent and non-urgent tweets to show where people might need the most help after a disaster. Another parsed data using Python to define important words, extract text features, score words to surface relevant text, and break text into words from tweets, news headlines, and FEMA articles — producing a database of keywords searchable by event hashtag, geographic location, and road intersection. A third developed dynamic code that calls Zillow's application programming interface (API) directly and pairs it with additional coefficients to estimate the monetary cost of certain catastrophic events.
"We've done a number of projects over the last three months," one of the presenting students described. "We started off designing a video game. We worked on predicting housing prices in different states. We've looked at predicting diseases based on certain factors. We've done time-series analysis using financial data. We're always doing something a little different each week, so shifting to working with FEMA and New Light on mapping was not a hard shift."
The room was full of GA instructors, NLT researchers, and industry professionals. When each group finished, the question-and-answer segments burst with audience interest, and afterward invitations were extended for students to discuss their work at the FEMA office itself.
"This is only the beginning of our partnership with General Assembly," the NLT scientist said, looking toward further collaboration. "I hope we will help General Assembly incorporate geospatial big data into their data science curriculum and eventually play an important role in training the next generation of data scientists."
About New Light Technologies
New Light Technologies (NLT) is a Washington, DC-based firm with 25+ years of experience delivering:
- Geospatial systems and enterprise GIS
- Cloud-native data platforms
- AI/ML and advanced analytics
- DevSecOps and cybersecurity solutions
NLT supports federal, state, and international organizations in operationalizing data for mission impact.