Hotspots Project
In collaboration with Lexington's Town Celebration Committee
Introduction
Lexington, MA is a town with many historic landmarks and
enjoyable events such as the famous Patriots' Day parade.
Unfortunately, Patriots' Day had to be virtual in 2021 due to
COVID-19. The Lexington Town Government’s Celebration committee
reached out to our coding team; they wanted us to create a
website with virtual events for people to have fun in despite
the pandemic. Our website allowed residents to participate in
multiple activities including taking photos in front of
historical locations. These monuments were popular and visited
very frequently during the event. Please check the
Patriots' Day project page for more
detail. Another major activity of the parade was that
participants could mark their location on a GPS based map system
for each of the monuments they visited. This helped our team
collect data for future use, and inspired the Hotspots project.
What We Did
In this Hotspots project, we planned on developing a machine
learning algorithm that could successfully analyze data from the
2021 Patriots' Day parade. Our team learned the Weka API and
planned to code the final result in Java. The ultimate goal was
to publish a research paper of our findings and improve the
virtual parade for the future. However, we disbanded this
project in March 2022 when the Lexington government announced
their Patriots Day' parade would return in person. Also,
co-leader Gabriel Sui got accepted to the University of Oxford,
England and eventually graduated our team! Instead, our team
joined other ongoing projects to continue helping our town!
Impact On Community
In this project, our group analyzed data collected from the 2021
virtual Patriots' Day parade to search for patterns that could
improve the event in the future. Civic engagement is promoted
through this event by building a sense of community, giving
citizens an opportunity to go outside and visit town landmarks
inspiring a sense of pride for the rich heritage of the town.
Since many Lexington citizens had minimized social contact and
isolated themselves during the pandemic, the Patriots' Day event
also promoted taking a nice walk, run or bike ride with friends
and family. The Hotspots data planned to enhance the event and
encourage future engagement, further benefiting our community!
Members
Team Leads: Everest Yang, Gabriel Sui
Members: Yuanheng Mao, Joseph Jia, Eddie Zhu
