On Sept. 21, Professor Marta Gonzalez’s essay titled, “From Data to Models that Improve Urban Policy” was published in The Cities Papers. Emphasizing the new data-rich reality of cities, this essay explores deeper insights into the social connections to help improve urban environments. This was an invited essay from a Dec. 2014 conference in Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, which brought together 40 distinguished scholars, among them various members of the national academy of sciences. The conference shared promising and successful approaches in order to promote broader participation in the use of big data for social science. Read the essay.