Student Perspective: DSAN Students Tackle Parking Optimization in Arlington

By Trey Roark (MS ’26)

Trey and Sophie speak at Coding the Curb Hackathon

Recently, Sophia Rutman (MS ’26) and I had the opportunity to attend the Code the Curb conference in Arlington, Virginia. This was a multidisciplinary event was a month-long hackathon centered around analyzing parking data from local lots. Initially, the original challenge encouraged participants to create front-end web applications that optimize parking spot selection, but we decided to take a different approach. When we discovered that the Application Programming Interface (API) provided for the event included historical parking data spanning an entire year, we saw an opportunity to explore broader trends.

Over the course of the hackathon, we developed insights into how parking behaviors fluctuate during these times and prepared our findings for presentation at the conference. It enabled us to learn about new models and methods we could utilize on future data challenges.

There was a considerable amount of people from many different fields of work. Professionals from various fields—software engineers, entrepreneurs, data analysts, consultants, mathematicians, and DevOps specialists—were all in attendance. Specifically, we were surprised at how many people represented their own tech start-ups, and the ambition that came with that.

Trey and Sophie speak at the Code the Curb Hackathon

After our presentation, taking questions, and giving recommendations on how parking can be made more efficient utilizing the previous data collected from the API, a period of networking gave us the chance to talk with the others and those we hadn’t met, to discuss both our projects and our future work. During the Q&A session, we shared recommendations for improving parking efficiency by leveraging the insights gained from historical data. Many were appreciative of our initiative to forefront trend analysis rather than developing a web application. They were also excited to see technical presentations done in a manner that was both professional and fun (shoutout PowerPoint). The subsequent networking period provided a fantastic opportunity to connect with other participants and exchange ideas about future projects and collaborations. Outside of our presentation, we got to learn about how some of the other participants took on the challenge and were very intrigued by many of the creative insights!

Overall, the experience was both enriching and inspiring. Events like these not only push us to think critically and creatively but also foster a sense of community among professionals from diverse backgrounds.