Chi Hack Night: Cook County Assessor's Office

Join us for our monthly in-person Chi Hack Night! We will be at a new location: i.c.stars,a non-profit tech training & placement program!

Chi Hack Night is a group of thousands of designers, academic researchers, data journalists, activists, policy wonks, web developers and curious citizens who want to make our city more just, equitable, transparent and delightful to live in through data, design and technology.

Presentation - Jean Cochrane, Interim Director of Data Science, Cook County Assessor's Office
The Data team at the Cook County Assessor’s Office (CCAO) is responsible for estimating the value of over a million homes in Cook County using public sales data. We do that using a boosted tree model that is less regressive and more accurate than linear models, and while our model is relatively simple as far as models go, it can be difficult to explain how it works in a clear, accessible way. We can talk about things like tree depth, SHAP values, and vertical equity statistics all day, but what most people want to know is: “What sales did the model use to value my home?”

Enter the CCAO Model Value Report: A web app that shows all of the property characteristics the CCAO’s model used to value your home, alongside the top five sales that were most important to the model’s estimation of your value.In this talk, the CCAO

Data team will explain how and why we built the Model Value Report. We’ll talk about the questions we want the app to answer for homeowners, the UX design decisions we made to help answer those questions, and the nitty-gritty details of how we built it all -- from the development of a brand new AI explainability algorithm, to the scaling of that algorithm across all homes in the County using high-performance Python code, to the 1.9 million static HTML pages that our Hugo app can generate and deploy in under an hour

What happens at a hack night?

Every week, we have a 45 minute presentation by a government agency, non-profit, company or group who've made use of open data or built a civic technology application. The goal of these presentations is to showcase the different uses and opportunities, as well as challenges and successes in the civic technology movement.

After the presentation, the format of the event is similar to that of a hackathon where breakout groups self-organize to work on civic apps, discuss policies and their implications, learn technical skills and network with a welcoming and diverse community at the intersection of technology and government.

But I'm not a techie!

That's ok! We encourage non-technical folks to pair up and learn from our community's designers and developers. We've seen time and time again, the best civic projects come from teams with a diverse background.

Remember, there's much more to making a great app than just coding.

ASL interpreting available

If you have need for an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter, let us know when you register for the event and we will provide one, provided enough lead time.

Questions about the event? We have answers:

Q: I won’t be able to make it in person. Will the event be live streamed?

A: Yes. The event will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/chihacknight/live

Q: Will there be food?

A: Yes! We will be serving Costa Rican empanadas, chicken casado and rice from Irazu!

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

750 N Orleans St, 750 North Orleans Street, Chicago, United States