The Datalife project, jointly organized by Politecnico di Milano and New York University, yearly engages an interdisciplinary team of  students from Polimi (Master in Computer Engineering and Master Master in Design) and from the Master program of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at NYU. The student activity is part of CUSP’s Capstone Program, that brings together student teams with government agencies, industry, or other research partners to address real-world urban challenges through data. The Capstone presentation event, on August 9^th is the culmination of their six-month projects.

This year’s Datalife has been sponsored by DELCON. Founded in 1981, Delcon is a “technology boutique” inspired by Italian design towards customer centric solutions. Today it plays a leading role in the design and production of software and medical devices for transfusion medicine, blood collection and processing, hematology and microbiology.

The students (Davide Calabrò, Stefano Fedeli and Marco Valli from PoliMi; Lina Kasem, Yichen Li and Rachel Provost from NYU) focused on analyzing and representing the behavior of young generations towards blood donations in the cities of Milano and New York, for understanding the main drivers encouraging these segments to donate blood. Considered aspects have included the role of blood centers and blood donation in young generations' life, the study of young generation’s behavior towards donating blood, the analogies with other social-ethical and future impacting topics i.e. ecology and sustainability, and the discovery of the main drivers that can boost blood donation on social media among young generations. In their work, the team engaged in social media analytics and used data science for data exploration, discovery and prediction; they also collected about one thousand interviews from students from PoliMi and NYU.