Chinatown Block Party

Posted on June 30, 2011 at 2:09 am by FuChiPhilly

This Saturday, July 2nd 12 – 4 pm, is the Chinatown block party. Fu Chi is going to have a booth there to promote our project. Everyone should come walk around Chinatown, learn what’s happening, try some new restaurants, and most importantly, stop by our booth to say hi. You can find us on this map. If you text or send in report to our site on Saturday, you will have a chance to win discount gift cards from one of our sponsors, including Yummy Lan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House, Empress Garden, Sakura Mandarin, Heung Fa Chun Sweet House and Chinese Arts & Crafts. See you all there!!

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FuChi in San Francisco

Posted on June 13, 2011 at 10:37 am by gguth714

We’re in sunny San Francisco for the PURBA conference. It’s been great to get a break from the heat in Philly, we checked out SF Chinatown and did a lot of sightseeing, then we presented yesterday. The audience seemed to really like what we showed, we think it was probably a good change of pace from the other technical papers (here’s a link to all the papers), and during the discussion afterwards our project was often mentioned as an example of an app that is trying to solve a specific problem. We made some good contacts and we’ll definitely keep in touch with them after we return to Philly.

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Fu Chi Posted on MobileActive.org!

Posted on May 25, 2011 at 7:39 am by gguth714

Thanks so much to MobileActive.org for posting our project. MobileActive is the source for social projects using mobile technology. We were inspired by many projects listed on their website, and we hope ours can help future social activists. Here’s the link.

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Pervasive Urban Computing Conference Coming Up!

Posted on May 22, 2011 at 4:54 pm by gguth714

Our trip to San Francisco for the Pervasive Urban Computing Conference is fast approaching! We started thinking about our presentation (it’s only 5 min long, so the hard part will be figuring out what not to include). We’ll keep you posted about developments as we get closer to the presentation on June 12.

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Turned down for our first grant

Posted on May 17, 2011 at 4:56 pm by gguth714

Well we got some news today that was a little depressing – our application for $10,000 through UArts is no longer in the running. We know our project might be of interest to some funders out there somewhere though, so if anyone has ideas please comment or email them to us (fuchi@futurechinatown.com). We were hoping to cover our time and the promotional campaign for the summer, but any amount would be helpful at this point.

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FuChi Thesis Book Finished

Posted on May 13, 2011 at 4:41 pm by gguth714

We just posted our complete thesis book on issuu. We are still going to make some finishing touches – feel free to comment or share the link with others. When we’re sure we’ve made everything clear and didn’t forget anything, we are going to print it on lulu.com where anyone can order a copy – we’ll be sure to post the link when we do.

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Good feedback from workshop with Chinatown’s Leaders

Posted on April 13, 2011 at 12:16 pm by gguth714


Thursday we held a workshop with some of Chinatown’s leaders, people working for Chinatown’s future through various organizations in the neighborhood. We asked them to envision a future for the neighborhood, and what it might take to get there.

As we suspected, everyone agreed that the best future for Chinatown would be a clean, safe environment, with a vibrant community center and lots of ways for residents and visitors to the neighborhood to have meaningful cultural interactions. We also heard that part of the reason these goals seem hard to reach is that there are “too many chiefs” in the neighborhood, who like to pursue their own projects. We’re going to incorporate these ideas into our system and start thinking of ways to shape our project to fit these goals.

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Result from Chinatown Cleanup

Posted on April 2, 2011 at 3:47 pm by FuChiPhilly

What a wonderful day to clean up the neighborhood!

PCDC did a tremendous job to recuit community members and all the teenagers from local high schools. Even volunteers from outside of the community helped out. We also saw some people representing Philly 311.

When people met up in the morning, we distributed little slips of information asking volunteers to text us their clean up effort. We had some responses by the end of the day. Not exactly as we expected, but we understand that everyone is exhausted. Nevertheless, we got to document the process and the result of the cleanup. And the result is fantastic! Within a couple of hours of work, Chinatown cleaned up over 187 bags of trash. If you walk around town, you will definitely feel it’s much cleaner.

PS. Special thanks to Mabel for providing free lunch to all volunteers at Joy Tsin Lau!

Great job Chinatown!

Edit. More text messages just came through while updating the blog post! Great!

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Chinatown Clean Up

Posted on April 1, 2011 at 4:55 pm by FuChiPhilly

Tomorrow is the Philly Spring Cleanup . Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC) is also hosting a clean up in Chinatown. We will be documenting the process. Also, we would like to ask all the participants to send in a text of their progress to 17752374407. We will see how the clean up goes! Register to volunteer and come join us tomorrow at 10th St. and Vine St. at 9am.

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Paper Accepted to Pervasive Urban Computing Conference

Posted on March 25, 2011 at 11:53 am by gguth714


We just heard today that our submission to the First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) was accepted! We’re really excited to be a part of this conference, and the feedback from the reviewers was helpful and encouraging. The workshop aims to address new capabilities of data collection from sensing and telecommunication networks that can reflect various aspects of urban life, but also raises questions. “These questions must be addressed as we move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically.” PURBA is organized by MIT and will take place in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing in San Francisco, CA, USA on June 12-15. We’re going to get started on writing the paper today!

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