Carnegie Mellon University

City of Pittsburgh

Smart Services for People Experiencing Homelessness

Every year, thousands of individuals experience homelessness in Pittsburgh. Numerous agencies offer street outreach services, but due to the lack of a collaboration platform, their efforts are often duplicated, resulting in inefficient and inequitable service delivery. Working with local agencies, the project team has developed Socius, a tool that enables location-based collaboration and predictive analytics in order to help agencies coordinate and develop data-driven service planning. 

Impact: Socius will increase the number of homeless people that are served and introduced to a long-term pathway to end their homelessness, and will help government agencies plan new service types and locations based on the mobility and needs patterns of the homeless populations. The project team is beginning a pilot with Operation Safety Net, one of the largest street outreach providers in the region.

The App: https://socius.herokuapp.com/about

The Team: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mklee/team/index.html