Blog – Hersh Gupta

I Didn’t Leave Public Service, Public Service Left Me: Why Inefficient Government Hiring Processes Drove Me Away

Employment

Government

When I graduated college with technical skills in statistics and computational social science, I was drawn to public service. A semester in the nation’s capital and deep…

What I Learned Building CityUpdate: An AI-Powered Data Product for Public Sector Transparency

Government

AI

LLM

What I learned building CityUpdate, an AI powered data product for the public sector

Building Smarter 311 Systems with Vision Models

Government

AI

LMM

Enhance city service requests with AI

Local Vision-Language Model Experimentation for Public Sector Use Cases

Open Source

Government

AI

Computer vision has evolved many times, from basic handwriting pattern recognition to object detection. Now, with the emergence of Large Multimodal Model (LMM), it’s…

Why Most State and Local Generative AI Efforts Won’t Be as Impactful as Promised

Government

AI

I'm a data scientist working on AI in city government. I think hype around generative AI in the public sector is causing more issues than it promises to solve.

Observable’s New Framework: A Better Way for Cities to Tell Data Stories

Open Source

Government

Cities today want to leverage their vast amounts of open data to tell compelling stories that inform, optimize operations, and engage citizens. However, it is too expensive…

How Cities Can Create Better Data Interfaces: Lessons Learned from Redesigning RentSmart Boston

Open Source

Government

tl;dr: redesigning the Boston RentSmart dashboard helped me understand when and why cities should choose to build custom web interfaces for datasets.

How government analytics teams can embrace #PublicMoneyPublicCode

Open Source

Government

The push for Public Money, Public Code started in Europe with the aim that government software developed for the public sector should be made publicly available via a Free…

City Government Open Source Efforts, Ranked by Their Github Stats

Open Source

Government

In 2016, then US Chief Information Officer Tony Scott announced the launch code.gov, stating