Urban Informatics
This lecture will cover the main themes in the emerging field of Urban Informatics. To begin
with, the lecture will cover a few key theories from urban sociology (mainly from the 60s).
It will cover experiments done by Kevin Lynch and Stanley Milgram and ethnographic work by
Jane Jacobs. I will also briefly introduce basic concepts from modern geography such
as Gravity Models. The lecture will then discuss how that work in sociology and geography has
been recently rephrased by scientists in the fields of complex systems and
computer science. More specifically, we will see: 1) how the Gravity
Model and data coming from electronic subway tickets have been combined to track social deprivation in a
real-time fashion; and 2) how Flickr metadata and Foursquare relational data
have been used to redefine geographic boundaries; 3) how crowdsourcing of Google
Street Views has been exploited to determine which visual cues are generally associated with the fuzzy
concepts of beauty, quiet, and happiness; and 4) how existing mapping tools have
been reengineered to go beyond the recommendation of shortest paths.
Bio
Daniele Quercia is a computer scientist, has been named one of Fortune magazine's 2014 Data All-Stars,
and spoke about "happy maps" at TED. He is interested in the relationship between
online and offline worlds, and his work has been focusing in the area of
urban informatics. He was Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs,
a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the
University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from
UC London. His thesis was sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge and
was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.