Introduced by Parsa Attari, Khalil Joseph, Yash Kirloskar, Amir Shahatit and Rami Shahatit
UC Berkeley students from Data-X, in conjunction with University of the Aegean in Greece, have recently completed a project that could illuminate previously unknown investment opportunities in Greece.
With data provided by University of the Aegean, the students used web-scraping to create an interactive heat map that plots the best opportunities for investment in the Aegean Islands. The students determined which areas would be best for investment based on their GDP and number of one-bedroom homes, along with a number of other factors.
Leveraging front-end web design and development tools, the team created an interface that allows users to choose the specific layout that will best aid their research. Researchers can view different heat maps based on the key investment feature they’re interested in, such as real estate or GDP.
Because the students were working with an enormous amount of data, much of the project was focused on cleaning the data, or altering it to ensure accuracy and consistency. The direction of the project and the final decision to use a heat map was a joint decision between the team in Greece along with the members of the group in Berkeley.
The final product was shipped back to the graduate team at University of the Aegean to be used as a framework for further study and to provide insight on how researchers can find ways to work with the scarce data on the region.