 I would like to welcome you here to this breakout session. The seat says hi. My name is Sarah Pornet. I work at Media Evolution as a business developer. And the first speaker is Maria Papova. Welcome. So I want to start with a little clip from William White's 1980 film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which was the culmination of research that he and his team began in 1969. And this particular bit is called The Street Corner. Many people didn't think that it would be. But it was a movement to find out why. I, in search of the street corner project, have been observing other times of city traffic. There was a block on the 113rd street in the town. But within that time, but almost seven packets, the earlier we were to find that it was important for a city space, we couldn't have found that right here. Things were right under our nose. So what does The Street Corner look like today? And in the age of data are the clues to what makes robust public life more under our noses ever before. I think so, if only we're able to extract them. Backtracking to the 1930s when Louis Mumford was the first to sort of bring urbanism into the world of formal academia as a field of study. And he wrote a book called Technics and Civilization, in which he traced as far back as he could why humans adopted technologies and how they appropriated them and why they chose certain technologies over others and, above all, how those decisions shaped entire societies. And then in 1961, he followed up with The City and History, which remains one of the most influential books in urbanism. All of his writing, all of his work is very smart and very timeless in a lot of ways. But one particular bit stands out to me. He wrote, the chief function of The City is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan, the granddaddy of media theory, famously said, the quest for identity goes with bumping into other people. Now, fast-forward half a century since Mumford and we get physicist Geoffrey West, who studies complex systems from organisms to cities and looks at how data and data analytics can help us better understand them. He spoke at TED Global in Edinburgh last summer, and he told us that every week from now until 2050, more than a million people are being added to our cities. Now, think about that for a moment. A million people a week. Those are a lot of opportunities to bump into other people. And with other people come the technologies that they bring and all the personal data that we carry with us, both on our persons and our devices and all the metadata about our lives that is out there. So how does that change the social creativity that Mumford talks about? Another one of McLuhan's most famous aphorisms is that all media work is over completely. And indeed our media and especially our communication technologies have changed enormously even in the last decade alone. And what emerges from that is a whole new way of constructing our identity, not only as individual citizens, but also in how we relate to one another and to our cities at times of triumph and times of conflict using the city as a platform and as an epicenter of this collective self-creation. So this is what we're going to hear about today from Jake Barton and Mike Magurski, both of whom do amazing work at the intersection of cities, data and what it means to be human today. With that, Jake, take it away.