Future Cities Catapult
Urban Data Scientist
Candidate Information Pack
April 2014
Future Cities Catapult
Urban Data Scientist
About the Catapult
We are the Future Cities Catapult, a global centre of excellence on urban innovation. A place
where cities, businesses and universities come together to develop solutions to the future
needs of our cities.
What's the big idea?
We're one of seven ‘Catapults' launched by the UK's Technology Strategy Board. The aim for
each of them is to become a world-leading innovation centre in its own specialist area.
As you can guess by the name, our Catapult is all about urban innovation. In particular, we're
focused squarely on the challenge of urban integration: how cities can take a more joined-up
approach to the way they plan and operate. To improve quality of life, strengthen their
economy and protect the environment.
What we do
Based in the heart of London, our role is to get people working together to solve real
challenges faced by real cities right now.
Cities sharing what's worked for them in the past. Companies and universities working
together. New innovations being road tested at scale. New solutions getting to market.
Financiers, lawyers and city governments teaming up to remove barriers to innovation. The
Future Cities Catapult is a neutral space where all this happens.
We're making London the place to come for cities that need help with urban innovation. And
we're also driving future economic growth in the process. Because we're based in London
we unlock global markets for British business, and help UK businesses create the products
and services that cities need around the world.
How will we do it?
Our vision is a world where every city has the products, services and expertise it needs to
integrate its systems and future-proof itself for the benefit of its citizens, economy and
environment.
To achieve that, our mission is to bring together cities, firms and academics to develop new
commercial solutions for integrated city systems. We do three things:
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demonstrate the opportunity and prove what works
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enable innovation through collaboration
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remove barriers to scaling-up.
Our approach
Too often we do things in cities that fight against each other. We make life easier for the car
and create health problems for people. We use energy to keep one building cool next to a
building we're trying to keep warm. We build homes miles away from jobs. We create traffic
jams.
The future is integrated
What makes more sense is for city systems to work together for mutual benefit. Waste and
energy systems working in tandem to create low-carbon energy from rubbish. Mobile
networks helping transport systems deal with rush hour. That sort of thing.
Fostering this integration is what the Future Cities Catapult is here to do. Encouraging cities
to operate in a more joined-up way – helping them improve quality of life, strengthen their
economies and protect their environment.
Collaborative innovation
But urban integration is a complicated issue. Sometimes one of the hardest things is getting
the right people in the right room at the right time. Making this happen is one of the key
roles the Future Cities Catapult plays.
We're creating a cutting edge innovation space in London where experts from all around the
world are invited to come together to innovate. A neutral space where businesses,
academia, investors and cities sit down and work together, facilitated by our urban
innovation specialists from the Future Cities Catapult.
It's a place where experts from all disciplines can work together. Imagine analysts talking to
scientists talking to environmentalists talking to anthropologists talking to behavioural
economists talking to architects talking to designers talking to financiers, all figuring out how
to sort out urban flooding… This is the way collaborative innovation will make a real
difference in the future.
Job Description
Job Title:
Urban Data Scientist
Location:
Central London
Responsible to:
Executive Director, Innovation and the Lab
Responsible for:
A vital role in the leadership of small multidisciplinary project
teams, ensuring the value and use of data is capitalised across
all the work of the Catapult.
Salary and benefits:
Competitive salary with attractive benefits
Working Hours:
Full-time position. The pattern of hours may vary according to
operational needs and generally work will be carried out during
normal office hours. We seek to be a flexible employer.
Contract:
This is a permanent contract. The period of notice is 3 months
in writing on each side. There is a probationary period of three
months.
Holiday:
25 days per annum, plus statutory holidays.
Equal Opportunities:
The FCC strives to be an equal opportunities employer and
commitment to this process will be expected.
Date Written:
March 2014
About the role
The Future Cities Catapult is looking to hire an Urban Data Scientist to lead and shape the
organisations use of urban data and modelling in solving city problems. The Urban Data
Scientist will operate across the organisation and the numerous collaborative projects to
harness small highly technical and creative teams of data scientists, modellers, software
engineers to bring order and life to large urban data streams and enable real world problems
to be better understood and addressed.
As well as providing scientific input to innovation processes the Urban Data Scientist will be
responsible for the analytics and modelling capability within the Catapult. This will involve
providing internal support but also developing external commercial relationships for the use
of models created or the expertise of the Catapult by a range of innovators, including both
large and small businesses, government analysts and academics.
First year outcomes
Each member of our team has a shared responsibility to help take the Catapult from
launch to 120 staff, £30 million turnover, a global reputation and a measurable
impact in innovating city solutions.
Responsibilities
1. You will possess leadership-driven qualities and be a crucial part of small highly
skilled and creative teams of data scientists, modellers and software engineers to
bring order and life to large urban data streams and enable real world problems to
be better understood and tackled.
2. You will play a vital role across the Catapult that will include coaching internal project
managers on how they can use data to enhance their projects, write proposals for
funding or responding to an external requirement and lead cross-functional teams of
to provide data insight and expertise to Catapult projects.
3. You will be able to work directly with city officials to help them understand the
capability of Big Data and how it could be applied to their core business model.
4. You will be skilled in working in multi-party collaborations with partners that include
universities, institutes, SMEs, global technology companies, and local and central
government bodies and agencies.
5. You will seek out and discover rich data sources working with this tremendous
amount of data shaping and interpreting it before starting to provide insights into the
“real-world” problems of integrated city systems that the Catapult looks to address.
6. You will clean the data sets making sure the data is consistent managing the large
volumes despite any hardware, software and bandwidth constraints.
7. You will design the algorithms and analytics that turn data into executable actions
and key metrics into predictive models. You will build rich tooling that enables others
to work with data effectively melding multiple datasets together and visualising that
data for the consumption and interpretation of internal staff, partners and customers
8. Take the insights generated from the analyses and deploy the insights to help design
further projects, consistent with the strategy of the Future Cities Catapult.
9. Research and build software options and simulation capabilities for the use of the
Catapult and its stakeholders, partners and customers.
About You
Skills and experience
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A senior data professional who has urban modelling or urban big data experience.
Proven experience ability to manage and/or coordinate teams in multidisciplinary
projects.
Practical application of their technical skills that have helped solve a “real-world”
problem and can demonstrate their role leading the process.
You will have advanced experience in disciplines such as experimental design,
analytics over vast sets of structured and unstructured data, autonomic systems,
static and real-time data, and the creation and use of metadata. Most likely this will
be accompanied with a PhD.
Some form of commercial experience, preferably including a component of
consulting.
Able to create and lead an agile and dynamic team that will consist of data scientists,
software engineers and creative technologists.
Able to thrive in a dynamic new start-up with fast-paced environment and provide
high-quality support to a wide variety of project stakeholders.
COMPETENCIES
Technical expertise: deep expertise in a relevant scientific discipline applied to urban
problems with the ability to take a citizen-centred design process.
Creativity and Curiosity: a desire to go beneath the surface and discover and distil a problem
down into a very clear set of hypotheses that can be tested.
Storytelling: the ability to use data to tell a story and to be able to communicate it
effectively.
Analytical skills: the ability to look at a problem in different, creative ways.
Relationship-building: the ability to work with multiple internal and external stakeholders
understanding their needs and delivering meaningful contributions to projects.
Drive and Motivation: the ability to take significant amounts of complex data and create
rapid prototypes and drive the innovation process.
Collaborative: has the mind set to work across the Catapult and with partners to harness the
power of working together across multi-disciplinary teams.
OUR CULTURE
The Future Cities Catapult is a start-up. We are all deeply committed to our mission, and
you will need to share that commitment. You will have to be happy working in a fastmoving and unstructured environment. Our culture is open, collaborative and relatively
non-hierarchical. Oh, and we try to have fun, too!
Key Principles of the Catapult
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We are agile, collaborative and supportive
We are not bureaucratic
We are not overly proceduralised
We want to get everyone involved
We are a project based organisation
We aim to provide excellent services
We speak a common language
We take a cross functional approach
We want to develop integrated solutions
We are commercial