Introducing the Cyvl Data Outreach Team

At Cyvl, our work has always been about making cities smarter. We collect rich geospatial data on urban infrastructure and turn it into something actionable for municipal officials, whether they’re managing day-to-day operations or long-term strategic visions. Over 300 government partners are shaping the future of the nation's infrastructure with Cyvl, but we'd be remiss not to recognize what academia, civic tech, and non-profits are doing with similar data and techniques to drive change in their own corners of the world!

Launched in late 2025, Cyvl's Data Outreach Program was built to connect Cyvl's data and expertise with the broader community. The program focuses on three things: sharing real-world datasets for research and experimentation, supporting partners in navigating AI best practices, and fostering the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that tends to produce meaningful change.

Leading the effort is a small but mighty team:

Heetika Gada, Senior Machine Learning Engineer, brings deep expertise in machine learning and computer vision: the core of what makes Cyvl's data so powerful to work with.

Phi Bui, Full-Stack Engineer, has been at the center of our workshop programming, helping students understand how modern AI-assisted development actually works in practice.

Ethan Moynihan, Data Operations Engineer, keeps the data side running smoothly: ensuring partners have what they need to hit the ground running.

We've built our first partnerships in our backyard, the greater-Boston area, and have been truly energized by what's been built so far!

Recapping our partnerships

Our outreach efforts can be grouped into three main pillars: educational workshopping & hackathons, university research collaboration, and community partnerships.

Hackathons & Workshopping

BU Spark CivicHacks

Our deepest hackathon engagement to date was at Boston University's CivicHacks, hosted by BU Spark on February 21st. Cyvl shaped and judged an entire civic tech problem track at the event, which was focused on innovating around Cyvl's LiDAR point clouds, street-level imagery, and segmentation masks in Boston.

In our introductory session, in which the need for new civic tech initiatives in Boston was introduced, we had over 50 students attend, which was an amazing turnout! What made it special was the presence of GBH News, a household name in Boston public radio, and two elected officials from the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and South Boston. They joined as stakeholders, providing additional data and challenge objectives based on their experiences working with city residents.

Challenge ideas ranged from estimating tree heights using LiDAR (and asking the follow-on question: "if this tree falls, what does it hit?") to sidewalk accessibility assessment, sign compliance analysis, and traffic simulation based on road geometry. We were super impressed by all that the students were able to accomplish!

Tufts JumboHack

The Cyvl team judged the Tufts JumboHack hackathon on February 22nd as well (busy weekend for us!). Our highlight from the event was the workshop Phi led on AI best practices for code development, drawing a crowd of over 30 students!

University Research

MIT Urban Risk Lab

One of our earliest outreach efforts was with MIT's Urban Risk Lab, a group focused on embedding risk reduction into urban design and city resilience. Together, we scoped out a set of compelling flood modeling use cases: using LiDAR to analyze flood water porosity in buildings—essentially identifying structural low points to improve flood risk maps—and comparing 3D campus flood modeling with 2D outputs from East Boston.

UMass Amherst (NEUTC)

Through the New England University Transportation Center at UMass Amherst, we're supporting research into how vehicle sensors can be used to evaluate and track pavement condition over time. This is squarely in Cyvl's wheelhouse: our platform already produces pavement condition data at scale. The collaboration is an opportunity to contribute to rigorous academic benchmarking of those methods, which is paramount to us.

Community Organizations

Speak for the Trees Boston

Speak for the Trees (SFTT) is a Boston-based non-profit focused on growing and sustaining the city's urban tree canopy. We've been working with them to explore how Cyvl's data can be used to monitor tree distress across the city. SFTT provided their existing tree inventory in GeoJSON format, and we've been working on surfacing that data in a heat-mapped view within the Cyvl platform. A hands-on workshop with their team is coming up this spring—we’re super excited!

What we're excited for next

We’re thrilled to be sponsoring School of Data at the end of March, New York City’s premier open data conference for civic tech enthusiasts, urban studies researchers, and government data practitioners. This will be our first event outside of the Boston area, so we’re looking forward to meeting the NYC community and making new connections!

Want to work with us?

Cyvl's Public Data Repository provides access to sample street-level imagery, LiDAR point clouds, and derived datasets in select cities across the US. We're always looking for new partners who want to put this data to work in ways that benefit their communities.

Whether you're a university research group, a civic tech non-profit, or a hobbyist who wants to do something interesting with geospatial data, we'd love to hear from you!

To Close

“Throughout my education, I had almost no exposure to geospatial or civil technologies. At the same time, I’ve watched cities make major decisions without data to support them, often with serious consequences. That’s why it’s important to me that students know they can contribute to the infrastructure of the cities they live in and also help shape those decisions with better data and technology.” — Phi Bui, Full-Stack Engineer & Data Outreach Lead at Cyvl

‍