As part of the Town’s continuing effort to improve transparency, Arlington is announcing the launch of Arlington Visual Budget (AVB). AVB is a new online tool intended to provide the public with a visual representation of the Town’s financial history and outlook, as well as illustrate key trends. AVB allows users to dive into the budget like never before using graphics to more easily understand how tax dollars are spent.

“Increasing transparency and accessibility to financial information has long been a goal for the Town,” said Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine. “We hope this new feature will encourage users to learn more about Town finances and be more engaged in the annual budget discourse.”

Arlington Visual Budget at Code for Boston's Demo Night
(co-hosted with IxDA)
MIT, Cambridge Innovation Center, 5th Floor, Havana Conference Room
July 30, 2013
Free & Open to the Public

Involution Studios' hGraph — the only open source visualization for your complete health metrics — is being featured this month in "Digital Diagnosis: A New Generation of Healthcare Technology" in EContent Magazine.

The column, written by Eileen Mullan, explores how apps and visualization services like hGraph can help cut through the hassle of going to the doctor. Mullan writes, "hGraph is [...] designed to increase awareness of the individual factors that can affect overall health. Basically, it gives you (and your doctor) a holistic view of your health. You can have your entire medical history in one place, just like that. Imagine what something like hGraph will do for the future of healthcare industry (and for the time you waste in the waiting room)?"

Involution client uTest has launched Applause, an analytics tool that offers clear, explicit data about what users truly feel about mobile apps. Applause enables app-owners to see how each version of their app measures up and the ability to compare their app to those of their competitors. Applause features sleek multi-version app graphs and a revolutionary rating scheme, with user interface design and development by Involution.

Yesterday at the New England Health Datapalooza, held at the DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., judges Pierce Graham-Jones, Innovator in Residence at the US Department of Health and Human Services; John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Group; and Manu Tandon, CIO of the MA Department of HHS, selected hGraph, an open system for visualizing personal health metrics designed by Involution Studios, as the second place finisher in the regional competition.

On the world stage of the 2012 London Olympic games, in today's hyper-competitive athletic environment, there's no doubt that any advantage, no matter how small, can make a difference.

For Immediate Release
NEW YORK, New York (U.S.) – August 28, 2012 – Involution Studios Creative Director Juhan Sonin was announced today as a speaker at the O'Reilly Strata Conference on big data, data science, and pervasive computing.

The Strata Conference brings together the best minds in the field of big data to envision the future, share expertise, and learn from others driving the connected revolution. The conference is focused on providing leadership for the transformation of business, finance, media, and government through the optimal use of data collection and analysis.

One of the great challenges of knowledge work is in understanding how to integrate virtual tools into the oftentimes tricky realm of human communication and relationships. We take for granted that the constantly evolving toolset available to us is ultimately helpful to our productivity and ability to complete our day-to-day tasks. How did work ever get done without mobile phones and the constant stream of e-mail? But the techniques for binding it all together — the ways to manage our time and our attention in order to best take advantage of the digital without becoming a slave to it — are still largely undefined. How do we incorporate the oftentimes virtual, and sometimes real world interactions that now make up business and professional relationships? We may work far away from our colleagues, then have face-to-face meetings, then go back to working at a distance. Sometimes it feels like we've been thrust into the virtual world with no rules. Increasingly, it seems like it is the duty of knowledge workers to figure out just how we should relate to our digital workplace, and each other.

Within this chaotic sea of digital tools that we incorporate into our work lives, perhaps one of the more interesting ones is our professional social graph. With a virtual professional network, you can stay connected to business contacts over time, and potentially build these relationships for mutual benefit. The professional social graph is our virtual map of our career contacts and reflects our work lives through the relationships we've developed. LinkedIn, of course, is the most popular and prominent business network in the US, with roughly 90 million members, although others like Viadeo and XING have significant traction internationally.

Energy is the industry that IT forgot — or at least until recently. While sectors as varied as finance and healthcare, entertainment and communications have roared ahead with digitization, automation, and analytics, the energy industry has not evolved as rapidly. Despite this fact, it's clear that the future of energy lies in software. In both conservation and sustainability, software offers great possibilities for innovation — enabling companies to understand consumption trends, make better decisions about energy usage, and improve efficiency and performance over time.

Last week, at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar "New Tools for the Energy Challenge", panelists discussed the opportunities and challenges facing the fledgling energy software space. The panel, moderated by Gabe Cole, SVP Transformation Services at technology consulting firm Telwares, included: Badri Raghaven, CTO of FirstFuel; Ganesan Ravishanker, CIO of Wellesley College; Lillian Smith, Principal User Experience Designer at Autodesk; and Kevin Johnson, CEO of Outsmart Power Systems.

Earlier this week, we released our Predicting Major League Baseball 2012 interactive information visualization with our picks for the playoffs this year. The visualization made its debut in the inaugural post on our recently launched channel on BostInno.