Craig Nevill-Manning and Kevin Webb
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 — 11:45am–1:00 pm (lunch provided at 11:45 am, talk begins at 12pm)
E51-315
Join Sidewalk Labs, a unit of Alphabet (formerly Google), for a discussion about three things (other than autonomous vehicles) that are redefining our transportation system. We'll explore questions about the right to mobility in a digital age; the intersection of technology, citizen experience and regionalism; and the future of open data in the world of private mobility services. The speakers will also give a broader introduction to Sidewalk Labs and its recently announced partnership with the USDOT to build Flow, a digital transportation platform for cities.
Kevin Webb, Entrepeneur-in-Residence
Kevin is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sidewalk Labs. He joined by way of Conveyal, a transportation technology firm. As a principal at Conveyal Kevin led projects related to open source software and open data strategy for the transportation sector. Conveyal led the development of several key software platforms including OpenTripPlanner, a widely used multimodal journey planner, and Transport Analyst an accessibility analysis tool co-created by the World Bank and used by transport planners and researchers around the world (and at MIT!). Kevin founded Conveyal along with colleagues from OpenPlans, a New York City based non-profit focused on improving cities through the use of open data and open source software. At OpenPlans Kevin co-directed the Transportation Group, where he led the development of transportation software for a variety of public sector clients.
Although he's spent much of his professional life working in technology sector, Kevin studied geography and urban planning as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Craig Nevill-Manning, Chief Technology Officer
Craig is Chief Technology Officer of Sidewalk Labs, leading the engineering team – which focuses on developing new urban technologies – and working with portfolio companies to develop their engineering teams and technology. Before joining Sidewalk Labs, he founded Google's first remote engineering center, located in New York City. In his role as Engineering Director at Google, he oversaw the development of products including Google Local (now Maps) and Froogle (now Google Shopping), as well as features of web search such as Question Answering and Web Definitions.
As engineering director of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, he co-founded Google.org's Flu Trends and Crisis Response projects, providing maps, imagery and a missing persons service after crises in Japan and elsewhere. Prior to joining Google in 2000, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University. He is the author of 44 peer-reviewed academic publications, and was awarded a Career Grant by the National Science Foundation for work combining information retrieval and computational biology.
A native of New Zealand, he earned a BSc in Computer Science from Canterbury University and a PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University. Passionate about great coffee, he co-founded Happy Bones café in Little Italy with his wife Kirsten and partners from New Zealand.