Decoding the Urban DNA and Harnessing the Power of Social Intelligence

The internet has long been a medium where every action -a click, a search, a communication, a word, a page link - could be collected, stored, and analyzed. This information is now being aggregated and harnessed in important new ways. For example collective search data can identify and track disease outbreaks, breaking news and emerging trends. Digital photos can be sewn together to render 3-D images of buildings, and participation in social networks distinguishes groups of related people. However, online information, while powerful, can be susceptible to “gaming”, and the active self-reporting of social networks and information can lead to bias, more pronounced herd behavior, and unreliability.

But sensors that support technologies like GPS and Wifi triangulation, can measure unbiased movements and behavior in the offline world. And these technologies are becoming standard in automobiles and mobile phones, generating an abundance of ambient data about places people visit, times and durations, and importantly, true social networks. Collectively, these bits of anonymous data can be used to uniquely describe, compare and contrast places and cities at a behavioral level. The movement of people between places creates a fascinating behavioral network that, when visualized, can highlight the distinct characteristics of each city and show how the urban organism reacts to major events and trends, in real-time. This network can then be used to find similar places, e.g. a restaurant like my favorite restaurant in my home city, and power local discovery. Our visualization is built on Skyrails, and is a 3-D tour of the behavioral network of a city.

This session will explore how analyzing the unique behavior of places based on combining movement data and semantic descriptions, can facilitate discovery of places, people, events, and trends.