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Apriqot is a community magnifying glass that enables data-driven decision-making.
What We Do
Apriqot develops health data analytics solutions that combine publicly available data on demographics, geographics, and public health metrics. Apriqot’s team has deep expertise in developing neighborhood and census tract-level estimates of health conditions using publicly available data, health surveys, disease registries, vital records, and administrative records.
Public Health Has a Problem
Health officials lack access to quality local data to inform program and policy decisions.
While many datasets contain some local data, no tool exists that can extract, combine, and transform that data to make it usable at the local level.
As a result, health officials miss community insights and trends that should be in plain sight, leading to ineffective and inefficient use of limited funds and resources.
Apriqot Has a Solution
ApriqotTM is the community magnifying glass missing from the public health data toolkit.
Apriqot is a demographic and geographic platform upon which local data can be grafted, community-level analysis can be performed, and future-looking models can be constructed.
Apriqot makes local data usable, allowing stakeholders to zoom in on their local context to detect what is happening, where it's happening, and who is impacted.
Our Team
Ken Shapiro
Co-founder / CEO
Kevin Konty
Co-founder / CTO
Data Scientist & Demographer
Ken is a skilled leader with deep experience managing and navigating health and human services systems as well as managing internal and external communications for those same systems. He has expertise at all levels of government, including extensive work with health and human services agencies, health care systems, and local health agencies. He has led the development of a Medicaid innovation/ population health management program (Whole Person Care). He has also overseen teams tasked with compliance, HR and labor relations, privacy, finance, legal, and communications. Ken leads all business processes, product management, and client relations.
Kevin has spent years developing methods to improve population estimation and public health surveillance. At the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Kevin has led technical teams working on a broad portfolio of public health problems involving epidemiology, statistics, demography, survey methodology, informatics, and geography. Over the past two decades Kevin has served as Senior Scientific Advisor, Director of Methodology in the Epidemiology Division, and Director of Data Science and Research for Family and Child health. His responsibilities have included developing the current system for the city’s neighborhood-level population estimates, directing the GIS center, acting as technical privacy officer, leading in-house technical consulting efforts, and serving in multiple data governance roles. He is currently leading efforts to integrate health and education data from multiple agencies. Kevin is leading the development of Apriqot’s core products.
Xinyan Liu
Data & Software Engineer
Nicole Hewes
Data Analyst & Communications Lead
Xinyan is a Master’s student in Computer Science at Northeastern’s Roux Institute. Xinyan’s academic and career journey is a testament to a deep-seated commitment to leveraging her interdisciplinary research background in environmental health science and computer science to tackle pressing public health challenges. As a data and software engineer, Xinyan’s work at Apriqot is driven by the goal of transforming complex data into actionable insights, creating tools that lead to more effective outcomes and contributing significantly to the sustainable well-being of global communities.
Nicole is a master's student in data analytics at Northeastern's Roux Institute. Previously, she served in public education for a decade, working with learners over the entire developmental spectrum, from preschool to college. Though the transition to the world of data marks a pivot, the throughlines of her career are an insatiable curiosity about how to make information compelling to diverse audiences and a commitment to organizations and projects focused on serving the public good. Nicole supports Apriqot product development, communications, and project management.
Dan O'Brien
Data Scientist
Rafael G. Ramos, PhD
Geospatial Consultant
Dan O’Brien is a data science master’s candidate at Northeastern’s Roux Institute. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University where he also studied mathematics and public health. His interests lie in the application of new tech to community development, childhood education, and ethical policy to promote human flourishing and stewardship of the earth. At Apriqot, Dan works as a data scientist and geospatial analyst.
Rafael G. Ramos, Ph.D. is a geospatial researcher with extensive experience in mapping and analyzing human & environmental data. He has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California Santa Barbara, MS & BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Campinas and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He has proposed and implemented new methodologies to improve data quality in geospatial applications and conducted studies on urban & environmental crimes, deforestation & conservation, health demographics, and vulnerability to extreme weather events. Dr. Ramos is currently affiliated with INPE, a collaborator at the Center for Studies on Violence at the University of São Paulo (NEV-USP), and a consultant at Apriqot, Inc.
Why Are We Called Apriqot?
There are many different reasons why we’re called Apriqot.
First, we like apricots!
But we also named our company Apriqot because apricots kept coming up while we were developing the idea. For example, Apriqot establishes and maintains many copies of the places we are characterizing, kind of like an ORCHARD. And within each characterization (a TREE) there are many individuals (like the APRICOTS). We also call the process of bringing in users’ local data and merging it with our data GRAFTING, and some of the methods we use to produce estimates use something called a KERNEL.
Also, we like that apricot is a color, which makes some decisions a lot easier (e.g., what color should our logo be?)
And apricots have a nice blush to them which makes them look a little like people.
But the real reason we are called Apriqot is a bit more convoluted. In public health, one typically uses “p” for the probability of having some condition or disease. If you are talking about a lot of people in community, then pit would be the probability of the ith person have the disease at time t. And if you wanted to talk about the average probability, you might use pot , pronounced “p naught t,” as the average probability of having the disease at time t. So the chance of not having a condition is 1-p, but that is also called q. So qot is the average probability of not having the condition or disease in the community– the probability of being well. That is the “-qot,”
And we added that to one of the most boring names that we thought of and didn’t use as our company name: “Applied Population Research Inc.” 🥱
And that is why we’re called Apriqot. Now if we could just figure out how it’s pronounced - ape-ricot or ah-pricot… Let us know what you think.
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