Providing Guidance to GreenRoots on Creating a Community Land Trust in Chelsea, Massachusetts

Chelsea, Massachusetts is currently in the process of gentrifying due to an increase in public transport, density increases of middle to high class commercial business, and increases in educated, middle class population. While these changes are beneficial to the new populations, current residents are at risk of displacement from their homes. Our goal is to help the Chelsea-based nonprofit GreenRoots by providing them with benefits and challenges of implementing a community land trust (CLT). We accomplished this by learning about other community land trusts and how they are able to maintain sustainable affordable housing. We also gathered interest about implementing a CLT from other Chelsea-based organizations, which will help GreenRoots determine if a CLT is appropriate for Chelsea

Sensing Depression

The hallmark indicator of depressive disorders is a presence of sad, empty, or irritable mood, accompanied by somatic and cognitive changes that significantly affect the individuals capacity to function. The overall goal of our project is to provide a tool for doctors to effortlessly detect depression, and in effect achieve greater coverage in detecting depression over the general population. We use machine learning techniques to create a mobile application that infers a smartphone users severity of depression from data scraped off their phone and social media websites. Through our study, we have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach to diagnosing depression, achieving an average testset RMSE of 5.67 across all modalities in the task of PHQ-9 score predictions