Urban computing

Abstract: The increasing ubiquity of digital technology, internet services and location-aware applications in our everyday lives allows for a seamless transitioning between the visible and the invisible infrastructure of cities: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology, and people networks create a buzzing environment that is alive and exciting. Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdisciplinary exchange, the Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology. This paper introduces urban informatics as a transdisciplinary practice across people, place and technology that can aid local governments, urban designers and planners in creating responsive and inclusive urban spaces and nurturing healthy cities. Three challenges are being discussed. First, people, and the challenge of creativity explores the opportunities and challenges of urban informatics that can lead to the design and development of new tools, methods and applications fostering participation, the democratisation of knowledge, and new creative practices. Second, technology, and the challenge of innovation examines how urban informatics can be applied to support user-led innovation with a view to promote entrepreneurial ideas and creative industries. Third, place, and the challenge of engagement discusses the potential to establish places within cities that are dedicated to place-based applications of urban informatics with a view to deliver community and civic engagement strategies.

Abstract: Recent concepts such as Smart Cities, Urban Computing, and Geographic Information Systems are being discussed in various international forums, using themes such as sustainability and efficient use of the city infrastructures. One important aspect in this regard is to correctly associate computational techniques with statistical models and integrate heterogeneous data sources using open data shared by cities. Based on that, this study uses open data from the city of Curitiba (Brazil) in order to bring results on the spatiotemporal evolution of business activities along a period of over thirty years. To that end, the study identifies and discusses important challenges that had to be tackled toward data quality, data categorization, and data integration, in order to perform this type of study in practice. By looking at the dynamics of geographically grounded microeconomic variables, this study shows how the expansion and diversification of business types in different neighborhoods happened, contributing to a better understanding of the process of evolution of the business activity in a city.

Abstract: We demonstrate Geotopics, a system to explore geographical patterns of urban activity. The system collects publicly shared check-ins generated by Foursquare users, that reveal who spends time where, when, and on what type of activity. It then employs sparse probabilistic modeling techniques to learn associations between different regions of a city and multi-feature descriptions of urban activity. Through a web interface, users of the system can select a city of interest and explore visualizations that highlight how different types of activity are spatially and temporally distributed in the city. We discuss the opportunities that web data offer to understand urban activity and the challenges one faces in that task. We then describe our approach and the architecture of Geotopics. Finally, we lay out the demonstration scenario.

Abstract: Techniques for analyzing effectiveness of an urban area based on traffic patterns collected from route-oriented vehicles. A process collects sequences of global positioning system (GPS) points in logs and identifies geographical locations to represent the urban area where the route-oriented vehicles traveled. The process models traffic patterns by: partitioning the urban area into regions based at least in part on major roads, segmenting the GPS points from the logs into time slots, and identifying the GPS points associated with transporting a passenger in the route-oriented vehicles. The process models traffic patterns by projecting the identified GPS points onto the regions to construct transitions of the identified GPS points travelling between the regions. Then the process builds a matrix of the regions for each time slot in each day based on a number of the transitions. Each item in the matrix represents an effectiveness of a connection between two regions.