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New York and Seattle Compete for Data Science Crown

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC initiative, whose centerpiece will be the new applied science campus on Roosevelt Island, is also providing money and motivation to make sure New York is mentioned in the same sentence as Big Data. The city is contributing $15 million in assistance to Columbia’s new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, which will begin offering a certificate program in the fall and ultimately hire 75 more professors. 

New York University has two new fronts: the Center for Data Science as well as the Center for Urban Science and Progress, both introducing master’s programs in the fall. With $15 million in city aid, CUSP will apply Big Data to practical urban issues like how to make skyscrapers more energy efficient or the subways more reliable. Until 2017, when a 150,000-square-foot campus and start-up incubator are carved out of the old transit headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, students will study at the nearby Polytechnic Institute of N.Y.U. Microsoft and Lutron Electronics will also collaborate with the Brooklyn center on research.

“New York City is on the verge of becoming a data science mecca,” said Yann LeCun, director of the Center for Data Science. “It’s partly because of those initiatives from Mayor Bloomberg and partly because of an extremely vibrant local industry of large and small start-up companies that are all highly involved in data analysis.” And, he added, “It’s much more fun to be in New York, in terms of life besides work. You don’t even have to own a car.”

Meanwhile, in Seattle, with its green hiking trails, coffee culture and tech industry, the University of Washington is making its own pitch. The university has opened the eScience Institute for studying data across disciplines and has a new Ph.D. program in Big Data. It also has many rich and powerful neighbors in tech to finance its data initiatives and lure big-name faculty members.

Since 2000, Microsoft has donated $22 million to the computer science program; Google gives several million dollars a year. And Amazon has endowed two professorships with $2 million; Jeff Bezos, its founder and chief executive, personally recruited Carlos Guestrin for computer science and Emily B. Fox for statistics.

The companies offer more than just money, said Mr. Guestrin, one of the world’s top machine-learning researchers, previously of Carnegie Mellon. “Money helps because students have to eat their ramen, but it’s not just that,” he said. Companies also lend students their real-world data to crunch. “Companies often see big challenges we might not see at that scale or have access to at the university,” he said, “and those connections can be transformative.”

Like New York, Seattle has draws outside the classroom. “It attracts certain geeks like me, nature-loving and into music, food and biking,” Mr. Guestrin said. But the biggest attraction, he said: “The data is on the West Coast.”

Bits Blog: Twitter to Add Photo Filters to Compete With Instagram

Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can’t buy it, build it.

In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images on Twitter and bypass Instagram, the popular mobilecentric photo-sharing network, according to people who work at the company but asked not to be named as they are not allowed to discuss unannounced projects. The filters on Instagram make photos look like they were shot with 1960s Kodachrome or with 1890s sepia tone film.

Although adding photo filters to Twitter may seem like a trivial addition to a social network that processes nearly a billion 140-character missives every two days, it could prove to be an important part of the company’s business.

As most smartphones are now equipped with high-resolution cameras, photography and mobile devices go together like peas and carrots. Flickr, which was once the go-to photo-sharing site on the Web, has since seen an exodus of people who have opted for Facebook or Instagram. Twitter has proved to be very popular among advertisers who want to reach people on smartphones, where the company’s audience tends to flock.

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswomen, declined to comment.

According to one Twitter employee, the company’s V.I.T.’s, or Very Important Tweeters, as they are known internally, usually celebrities and media personalities, would be especially happy to see filters in the Twitter mobile apps. Most V.I.T.’s now use Instagram to take photos, and then share them on Twitter, where they often have a larger following.

Although Twitter considered a photocentric product acquisition for some time, the move to build its own filters was hastened after Facebook said it would buy Instagram for $1 billion. (The deal ended up closing at $715 million after Facebook’s precipitous stock drop.)

After the Instagram acquisition was announced, Twitter executives explored buying a competing photo service or application. Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, both led the search, people close to the executives said. After meeting with and appraising some companies, Twitter’s executives decided the price tags were not worth the goods, and decided the company could build its own filters instead.

Although Twitter inked a deal with the photo-storage site Photobucket in June, the company has since started storing images on its own servers.

Twitter is exploring adding other tools to its mobile applications, one employee said, including the ability to upload and possibly edit videos without having to go through a third-party application or service, like YouTube.

Sadly, the Twitter-centric photo filters are not expected to be named after birds.

App City: Letting Movers Compete to Haul Your Stuff

“You have a big headache, and go through this whole process, and that’s when it’s done properly,” said Mr. Ben-Harosh, the founder of Unpakt. The company, which he started this summer, is one of two young local start-ups looking to use the Internet to upend the moving industry. Their goals may fall short of making moving pleasurable, but their leaders think they can make it less of an ordeal by forcing moving companies to compete openly.

Strangely, this has never quite happened. In order to get a moving company to estimate how much it will charge to take a job, customers have to itemize all of their possessions, often by arranging a face-to-face meeting with an agent from a mover. If the customers want to compare this estimate with another company’s rates, they will have to repeat the process with someone else.

This does not encourage comparison shopping. Kelly Eidson founded Moveline to operate like Kayak, the travel Web site where users see several companies’ rates for airline flights, hotel rooms and other services. Moveline helps customers itemize their possessions one time, and companies bid for their business. Moveline vets movers for quality, and the customer can choose based on price.

But there was one problem, said Ms. Eidson: people are no good at giving a realistic description of all their worldly possessions, which makes it hard for moving companies to provide realistic price quotes.

“You never really know how much stuff you have,” she said.

The solution is Moveline’s iPhone app, which was released last month. The app coaches customers on how to use the phone to make a video of their possession-filled apartments. Customers can also use FaceTime, the video chat feature, to give a Moveline representative a virtual tour. The company then makes an inventory itself, telling you things like, no, you can’t fit that walk-in closet full of winter coats into a single cardboard box. (The app is for iPhones only; Ms. Eidson said the video chat features on Android phones were not as good.) The process takes three to four minutes per room, Ms. Eidson said. Instead of using estimates, Moveline requires movers to guarantee the price of their bids.

Eliminating the uncertainty of an estimate is also a basic goal of Unpakt. Before Mr. Ben-Harosh started the company, he founded a company called FlatRate Moving, which offered a similar guarantee by breaking each job into dozens of variables and pricing each one. With Unpakt, Mr. Ben-Harosh essentially offers other movers access to this system. Each mover sets its price for various aspects of a move, and when Unpakt gets a detailed inventory from a customer through its Web site, it automatically generates a bid from each of its movers. (There are currently 12 in the New York area.)

FlatRate Moving is one of the companies bidding on the business generated by Unpakt, but Mr. Ben-Harosh said that the automated system did not steer business his way. He acknowledged that other moving companies were initially reluctant to participate. But he argued that the existence of a freely available online standard was incentive enough for small moving companies that did not necessarily want to build their own software platforms.

“In a way, we are introducing them to the online world,” he said.

Have a favorite New York City app? Send tips via e-mail to appcity@nytimes.com or via Twitter to @joshuabrustein.