DSSG Projects 2022

Avoiding bus-bunching (in partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Transportation)
Bus-bunching is the phenomenon when buses that were scheduled to be evenly spaced, run in practice in the same time and place. We performed a pilot with the Israeli Ministry of Transportation to determine why, where and when bus-bunching occurs, based on data consisting of a year of GPS transmissions of all the busses in Jerusalem.

Drug mixture analysis (in partnership with the Forensic Unit of the Israeli Police)
Drug samples collected by the police are usually mixtures of several components. These samples are analyzed by the forensic unit using a process called chromatography. We developed a clustering algorithm of chromatography results in order to identify similar drug mixtures, which indicate a common origin of the samples with high probability.

Bird migration study (in partnership with the Jerusalem Bird Observatory)
Israel lies along one of the world’s largest bird migration routes, therefore changes in bird prevalence here reflect broader ecological phenomena. Based on data collected over more than 20 years by the Jerusalem Bird Observatory, we performed a statistical analysis of changes in phenology, morphology and bird population over time. We found significant changes in the migration patterns, including advancement of mid and late spring migration, and broadening of the autumn migration season.