"Not only is it cool and fun, but it's very interesting intellectually and it's very useful to people," says the MIT senior.
If you're the parent of a teenager, chances are you've heard of the Snow Day Calculator. It's the high-tech version of putting a spoon under your pillow and wearing your pajamas inside out on the eve of a predicted snowstorm in the hopes that your school will close the next day.
David Sukhin, of Watchung, was a sixth-grader when he created the Snow Day Calculator in 2007. Today, the senior at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working to better predict school closures by using information such as snowplow data. "I remember when I was in middle school, I would be messaging my friends and saying, 'Hey, the snow has already started. Do you think they're going to close?' " says Watchung resident David Sukhin, who began working on the Snow Day Calculator in 2007 as a sixth-grader at the Pingry School in Basking Ridge.
Now 21, Sukhin is a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in computer science and business. He plans to seek a graduate degree at MIT in the same field, with an eye toward predictive analytics -- the practice of extracting information from existing data sources in order to predict behavior and trends.
"Not only is it cool and fun, but it's very interesting intellectually and it's very useful to people," says Sukhin. "Knowing something that's going to happen with a reasonable accuracy rate helps people plan and make decisions. I think that's applicable in almost every field."
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The Snow Day Calculator uses a mathematical algorithm (designed by Sukhin) that pulls the hourly forecast from the National Weather Service and checks it against local data provided by users, including ZIP code, type of school, whether or not school administrators are lenient and the "hype for a snow day" on a scale
of 0 to 3.
One of the ways the Snow Day Calculator, which covers about 8,000 schools across the country, can be accessed is through an app for smartphones. For snow day predictions, users can consult the website (snowdaycalculator.com), get text messages, and/or pay for an app for their smartphones. The Snow Day Calculator covers about 8,000 schools across the country.
"If there's a big snowstorm going on, it can get upward of 1 to 2 million hits in a day," Sukhin says.
Always looking for ways to improve the website's accuracy, Sukhin recently began seeking out snowplow data to better predict school closures due to icy road conditions, while further distinguishing between geographic areas that may get more snowfall each year.
It is this mining of data that Sukhin relishes as he looks to the future.
"Lots of things can be predicted, if you do the work and figure out the relationship with certain indicators," he says. "That's the kind of thing I'm definitely passionate about, the kind of artificial intelligence you can build just with information."
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