Impact
Adoption and outreach of the Urban Toolkit, by year. Each year runs from September to August. The numbers are collected again every time the site is published.
| Metric | Y1 Sep 2024 to Aug 2025 | Y2 Sep 2025 to Aug 2026 | Y3 (so far) Sep 1 to Sep 28, 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CI Software Ecosystem | |||
| 13 | 4 | 1 | |
| 4,975 | 31,987 | 37,641 | |
| 415 | 1,333 | 1,514 | |
| 415 | 2,251 | 6,524 | |
| GitHub stars (total since Sep 2024) | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Cloud Environment | |||
| Users at large | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| External cloud deployments | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Urban Data | |||
| Curated datasets | 0 | 9 | 0 |
| Community metrics | |||
| Hackathon attendance (per hackathon) | 0 | 30Interdisciplinary transportation workshop | 0 |
| Workshop attendance (per workshop) | 0 | 30Interdisciplinary transportation workshop | 0 |
| Use cases | 5 | 24 | 1 |
| Internship projects | 0 | 5 | 0 |
| Tutorials | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Courses | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Scientific Impact | |||
| Publications | 3 | 5 | 0 |
What is counted
Users at large
Y3 (so far)
- curio-dev.urbantk.org11 registered accounts on 2026-09-28
Curated datasets
Y2
- Chicago Energy Usage 2010Curio Data Catalog
- Chicago Green RoofsCurio Data Catalog
- Chicago Red-Light ViolationsCurio Data Catalog
- Chicago Speed Camera ViolationsCurio Data Catalog
- Project Sidewalk Chicago LabelsCurio Data Catalog
- Milan Census Polygons (over 65)Curio Data Catalog
- Milan ERA5 Hourly WeatherCurio Data Catalog
- Milan Mean Radiant TemperatureCurio Data Catalog
- niteroi_lst_verao_2001_2024.tifData of Curio example 08
Hackathon attendance (per hackathon)
Y2
- Interdisciplinary transportation workshopHackathons on real-world transportation and urban data, 30 attendees
Workshop attendance (per workshop)
Y2
- Interdisciplinary transportation workshopUIC with the University of Toronto and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, 30 attendees
Use cases
Y1
- Expert-in-the-loop urban accessibility analysesCurio paper
- What-if scenario planningCurio paper
- Visual analytics of heterogeneous dataCurio paper
- Sunlight access in Parisian parksDeep Umbra paper
- Analyzing land use-level street shadowsDeep Umbra paper
Y2
- Sidewalk accessibility (Project Sidewalk, Chicago)Curio example 01, Vega-Lite chained transforms
- Chicago green roofsCurio example 02, Vega-Lite spatial density
- Chicago speed-camera violationsCurio example 03, Vega-Lite linked temporal charts
- Chicago red-light violationsCurio example 04, Vega-Lite multi-flow dashboard
- Chicago building energy useCurio example 05, Vega-Lite multi-view drilldown
- Boston Back Bay building-height what-ifCurio example 06, Autark what-if shadow study
- Chicago Loop solstice shadowsCurio example 07, Autark GPU shader
- Niterói per-road warming trend (2001 to 2024)Curio example 08, Autark spatial join + regression
- Milan urban heat exposure (UTCI)Curio example 09, Heterogeneous data + linked views
- Chicago Lincoln Park greenery auditCurio example 10, Street-level computer vision
- Cross-height spatial comparison in building facadesOcclusion-Free Conformal Lensing for Spatiotemporal Visualization in 3D Urban Analytics paper
- Cross-season temporal comparison in building facadesOcclusion-Free Conformal Lensing for Spatiotemporal Visualization in 3D Urban Analytics paper
- Exploration of thematic data using direct queriesA Neural Field-Based Approach for View Computation & Data Exploration in 3D Urban Environments paper
- Viewpoint discovery using inverse queriesA Neural Field-Based Approach for View Computation & Data Exploration in 3D Urban Environments paper
- Quantifying visibility from buildingsA Neural Field-Based Approach for View Computation & Data Exploration in 3D Urban Environments paper
- Analyzing access with Project SidewalkUrbanite paper
- Topology exploration of social media dataUrbanite paper
- Impacted houses in flooding simulationUrbanite paper
- Analyzing sidewalk accessibility dataStreetWeave paper
- Detailed sidewalk accessibility analysisStreetWeave paper
- Exploring crime and 311 service dataStreetWeave paper
- Serverless remake of Urbane Autark paper
- Accumulated shadows in ChicagoAutark paper
- Heat islands in NiteróiAutark paper
Y3 (so far)
- Downtown Chicago ZIP polygonsCurio example 17, Autark GeoDataFrame maps
Internship projects
Y2
- Curio for street-level data collection (SideSeeing)Undergraduate intern, University of São Paulo
- Interaction provenance in CurioPhD intern, Universidade Federal Fluminense
- Sidewalk Stewards evaluationMaster's intern, Federal University of Pernambuco
- Research visitPhD intern, University of Birmingham
- Curio redevelopment and deploymentThree undergraduates, UIC Early Access to Paid Internships Program
Tutorials
Y2
- Autark in Action: Building Serverless Prototypes of Urban Visual Analytics SystemsSIBGRAPI 2026, Tutorials Track
Courses
Y2
- CS 424: Visualization & Visual AnalyticsUIC, Fall 2025, 61 students, with Curio
- CS 524: Big Data Visualization & AnalyticsUIC, Spring 2026, 22 students, with Curio
Publications
Y1
- Curio: A Dataflow-Based Framework for Collaborative Urban Visual AnalyticsIEEE VIS 2024
- Deep Umbra: A Generative Approach for Sunlight Access Computation in Urban SpacesIEEE Transactions on Big Data
- Assessing the landscape of toolkits, frameworks, and authoring tools for urban visual analytics systemsComputers & Graphics
Y2
- Occlusion-Free Conformal Lensing for Spatiotemporal Visualization in 3D Urban AnalyticsIEEE VR 2026
- A Neural Field-Based Approach for View Computation & Data Exploration in 3D Urban EnvironmentsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
- Urbanite: A Dataflow-Based Framework for Human-AI Interactive Alignment in Urban Visual AnalyticsIEEE VIS 2025
- VA-Blueprint: Uncovering Building Blocks for Visual Analytics System DesignIEEE VIS 2025
- StreetWeave: A Declarative Grammar for Street-Overlaid Visualization of Multivariate DataIEEE VIS 2025
How the numbers are collected
- Years. Each column counts its year on its own, except the rows marked "since Sep 2024", which add up from September 2024. The current year runs to the last update.
- External GitHub contributors. People with at least one commit that year, on any branch, to the 9 repositories listed under the row. They are external when no commit email, team listing or GitHub profile places them at University of Illinois Chicago, New York University and University of Washington. Bots are not counted. Git history of the repositoriesGitHub REST API: commitsGitHub REST API: usersTeam page
- Package downloads. PyPI downloads of utk and utk-curio, from ClickHouse's public PyPI dataset, and npm downloads of the 7 Autark packages. Monthly figures divide by the months of the period, counting the elapsed days of a partial month. ClickHouse's public PyPI datasetnpm download counts API
- GitHub stars. Stars on the 9 repositories that GitHub dates on or after September 1, 2024. GitHub GraphQL API: stargazers
- Users at large. Accounts registered on Curio's hosted instances (curio.urbantk.org and curio-dev.urbantk.org), without the shared guest account, as each instance's public monitor reports them. A year shows the last count taken in it. Curio monitor, curio.urbantk.orgCurio monitor, curio-dev.urbantk.org
- Curated datasets. Datasets in Curio's Data Catalog, other than boundaries and test samples, and the data files Curio's examples read, other than OpenStreetMap extracts. Each counts in the year it was added to Curio. Curio's Data CatalogCurio's example data
- Use cases. The urban use cases in the usage-scenario or case-study sections of the papers, in the year of the paper, and the examples in Curio's gallery that are not feature demos, in the year their walkthrough was added. Curio's example galleryPapers, read from their HTML versions on arXiv
- Publications. Papers on the Papers page, in the year of their issue. Preprints are not counted. Papers
- Reported by the team. Deployments, attendance, internship projects, tutorials and courses. Attendance is the mean per event. The team's figures, in impact.yaml
- Code. Every deploy of the site collects and computes all of these numbers again with these two files. Collector: scripts/impact/collect.mjsComputation: site/.vitepress/theme/node/impact.ts