On April 29 and 30, 2026, UIC hosted Cities in Motion: Transportation Data Innovation Challenge II, a data analytics hackathon and brainstorming workshop co-sponsored by the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Toronto, in the Arcade of UIC’s Computer Design Research and Learning Center.

Students worked with transportation datasets, including Sage sensor images of railroad crossings, and presented their analyses and visualizations on the first day. Researchers, students and practitioners then heard from Elizabeth Scott and Victoria Barrett of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and Joshua Auld of Argonne National Laboratory, and a keynote by Michael Papka of UIC and Argonne, before identifying the challenges and opportunities of transportation data in breakout groups. About 30 people took part.

The workshop followed a first edition at the University of Toronto in October 2025, co-hosted by its Mobility Network and UTTRI, where student teams worked with data from the City of Toronto, Esri Canada and UrbanScanner.