Project

Place Pulse

Place Pulse is a website that allows anybody to quickly run a crowdsourced study and interactively visualize the results. It works by taking a complex question, such as "Which place in Boston looks the safest?" and breaking it down into easier-to-answer binary pairs. Internet participants are given two images and asked "Which place looks safer?" From the responses, directed graphs are generated and can be mined, allowing the experimenter to identify interesting patterns in the data and form new hypotheses based on their observations. It works with any city or question and is highly scalable. With an increased understanding of human perception, it should be possible for calculated policy decisions to have a disproportionate impact on public opinion.