Article by Cyrus Moulton: “It’s a common question among locals whenever there’s a particularly large crowd at a special event or a local tourist attraction: “Where are these people coming from?”
A new online tool from the Social Urban Networks lab (SUNLab) with the Network Science Institute and the Boston Area Research Initiative at Northeastern University may be able to help.
“Communities are not only defined by who lives there,” the teams said in a prepared statement. “They are defined by who shows up, where they come from, and what they do.”
Called Mobility Data for Communities, or MD4C, the tool uses cellphone location data — aggregated and anonymized to protect privacy — to help communities better understand their visitors. The platform reveals such insights as who is coming to different communities, where these visitors come from, can estimate what activities they do in a community, how long they spend there, and more.
“The idea is to create what we call a ‘dynamical census’ in which we show who are the people visiting an area, where they come from, what they do when they are in that area, and how much time they spend, etc.,” said Esteban Moro, a professor of physics and director of SUNLab…(More)“.
