How big data and The Sims are helping us to build the cities of the future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Next Web: “By 2050, the United Nations predicts that around 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. It is expected that the greatest expansion will take place in developing regions such as Africa and Asia. Cities in these parts will be challenged to meet the needs of their residents, and provide sufficient housing, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, transportation, education and employment.

So, understanding how cities will grow – and how we can make them smarter and more sustainable along the way – is a high priority among researchers and governments the world over. We need to get to grips with the inner mechanisms of cities, if we’re to engineer them for the future. Fortunately, there are tools to help us do this. And even better, using them is a bit like playing SimCity….

Cities are complex systems. Increasingly, scientists studying cities have gone from thinking about “cities as machines”, to approaching “cities as organisms”. Viewing cities as complex, adaptive organisms – similar to natural systems like termite mounds or slime mould colonies – allows us to gain unique insights into their inner workings. …So, if cities are like organisms, it follows that we should examine them from the bottom-up, and seek to understand how unexpected large-scale phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Specifically, we can simulate how the behaviour of individual “agents” – whether they are people, households, or organisations – affect the urban environment, using a set of techniques known as “agent-based modelling”….These days, increases in computing power and the proliferation of big datagive agent-based modelling unprecedented power and scope. One of the most exciting developments is the potential to incorporate people’s thoughts and behaviours. In doing so, we can begin to model the impacts of people’s choices on present circumstances, and the future.

For example, we might want to know how changes to the road layout might affect crime rates in certain areas. By modelling the activities of individuals who might try to commit a crime, we can see how altering the urban environment influences how people move around the city, the types of houses that they become aware of, and consequently which places have the greatest risk of becoming the targets of burglary.

To fully realise the goal of simulating cities in this way, models need a huge amount of data. For example, to model the daily flow of people around a city, we need to know what kinds of things people spend their time doing, where they do them, who they do them with, and what drives their behaviour.

Without good-quality, high-resolution data, we have no way of knowing whether our models are producing realistic results. Big data could offer researchers a wealth of information to meet these twin needs. The kinds of data that are exciting urban modellers include:

  • Electronic travel cards that tell us how people move around a city.
  • Twitter messages that provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
  • The density of mobile telephones that hint at the presence of crowds.
  • Loyalty and credit-card transactions to understand consumer behaviour.
  • Participatory mapping of hitherto unknown urban spaces, such as Open Street Map.

These data can often be refined to the level of a single person. As a result, models of urban phenomena no longer need to rely on assumptions about the population as a whole – they can be tailored to capture the diversity of a city full of individuals, who often think and behave differently from one another….(More)

New traffic app and disaster prevention technology road tested

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Psych.org: “A new smartphone traffic app tested by citizens in Dublin, Ireland allows users to give feedback on traffic incidents, enabling traffic management centres to respond quicker when collisions and other incidents happen around the city. The ‘CrowdAlert’ app, which is now available for download, is one of the key components utilised in the EU-funded INSIGHT project and a good example of how smartphones and social networks can be harnessed to improve public services and safety.

‘We are witnessing an explosion in the quantity, quality, and variety of available information, fuelled in large part by advances in sensor networking, the availability of low-cost sensor-enabled devices and by the widespread adoption of powerful smart-phones,’ explains  coordinator professor Dimitrios Gunopulos from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. ‘These revolutionary technologies are driving the development and adoption of applications where mobile devices are used for continuous data sensing and analysis.’

The project also developed a novel citywide real-time traffic monitoring tool, the ‘INSIGHT System’, which was tested in real conditions in the Dublin City control room, along with nationwide disaster monitoring technologies. The INSIGHT system was shown to provide early warnings to experts at situation centres, enabling them to monitor situations in real-time, including disasters with potentially nation-wide impacts such as severe weather conditions, floods and subsequent knock-on events such as fires and power outages.

The project’s results will be of interest to public services, which have until now lacked the necessary infrastructure for handling and integrating miscellaneous data streams, including data from static and mobile sensors as well as information coming from social network sources, in real-time. Providing cities with the ability to manage emergency situations with enhanced capabilities will also open up new markets for network technologies….(More)”

Open Data Impact: How Zillow Uses Open Data to Level the Playing Field for Consumers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at US Dept of Commerce: “In the mid-2000s, several online data firms began to integrate real estate data with national maps to make the data more accessible for consumers. Of these firms, Zillow was the most effective at attracting users by rapidly growing its database, thanks in large part to open data. Zillow’s success is based, in part, on its ability to create tailored products that blend multiple data sources to answer customer’s questions about the housing market. Zillow’s platform lets customers easily compare neighborhoods and conduct thorough real estate searches through a single portal. This ensures a level playing field of information for home buyers, sellers and real estate professionals.

The system empowers consumers by providing them all the information needed to make well-informed decisions about buying or renting a home. For example, information from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey helps answer people’s questions about what kind of housing they can afford in any U.S. market. Zillow also creates market analysis reports, which inform consumer about whether it is a good time to buy or sell, how an individual property’s value is likely to fluctuate over time, or whether it is better to rent or to own in certain markets. These reports can even show which neighborhoods are the top buyers’ or sellers’ markets in a given city. Zillow uses a wide range of government data, not just from the Census Bureau, to produce economic analyses and products it then freely provides to the public.

In addition to creating reports from synthesized data, Zillow has made a conscious effort to make raw data more usable. It has combined rental, mortgage, and other data into granular metrics on individual neighborhoods and zip codes. For example, the “Breakeven Horizon” is a metric that gives users a snapshot of how long they would need to own a home in a given area for the accrued cost of buying to be less than renting. Zillow creates this by comparing the up-front costs of buying a home versus the amount of interest that money could generate, and then analyzing how median rents and home values are likely to fluctuate, affecting both values. By creating metrics, rankings, and indices, Zillow makes raw or difficult-to-quantify data readily accessible to the public.

While real estate agents can be instrumental in the process of finding a new home or selling an old one, Zillow and other platforms add value by connecting consumers to a wealth of data, some of which may have been accessible before but was too cumbersome for the average user. Not only does this allow buyers and sellers to make more informed decisions about real estate, but it also helps to balance the share of knowledge. Buyers have more information than ever before on available properties, their valuations for specific neighborhoods, and how those valuations have changed in relation to larger markets. Sellers can use the same types of information to evaluate offers they receive, or decide whether to list their home in the first place. The success that Zillow and other companies like it have achieved in the real estate market is a testament to how effective they have been in harnessing data to address consumers’ needs and it is a marvelous example of the power of open data….(More)”

A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianni Barlacchi et al in Scientific Data/Nature: “The study of socio-technical systems has been revolutionized by the unprecedented amount of digital records that are constantly being produced by human activities such as accessing Internet services, using mobile devices, and consuming energy and knowledge. In this paper, we describe the richest open multi-source dataset ever released on two geographical areas. The dataset is composed of telecommunications, weather, news, social networks and electricity data from the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino. The unique multi-source composition of the dataset makes it an ideal testbed for methodologies and approaches aimed at tackling a wide range of problems including energy consumption, mobility planning, tourist and migrant flows, urban structures and interactions, event detection, urban well-being and many others….(More)”

Slowly but surely, government IT enters the 21st century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: “Government IT departments have a mostly deserved reputation for being behind the times. While private companies keep giving customers new and better ways to buy products and learn about their services, government agencies have generally made it difficult for residents to interact with them via the Internet.

But this is slowly changing, with agencies from the local level to the federal level focusing on fixing broken websites and building new tools for Americans to get what they need from the government….

“Improve Detroit,” a smartphone app launched in April this year using technology from SeeClickFix, has helped Detroiters find out how to get things done. In its first six months of availability, 10,000 complaints were resolved in an average of nine days, “a vast improvement from when problems often languished for years,” the city said in an announcement this month.

Improve Detroit was used to get “more than 3,000 illegal dumping sites cleaned up; 2,092 potholes repaired; 991 complaints resolved related to running water in an abandoned structure; 565 abandoned vehicles removed; 506 water main breaks taken care of; [and] 277 traffic signal issues fixed,” Detroit said….

At the municipal level, Oakland is also planning to pass its hard-earned wisdom on to other cities. “Our goal is to create a roadmap for cities big and small,” Oakland Communications Director Karen Boyd told Ars.

Like Detroit, Oakland partnered with SeeClickFix and Code for America after experiencing tough economic times. “Oakland was particularly hard hit by the mortgage crisis [in 2008], a lot of predatory loans were made to our low-income folks,” Boyd said.

Property tax revenue plummeted and the city lost about a quarter of its government workforce, Boyd said.

“Governments were finding themselves way behind the curve on technology. We looked up and realized this was no longer sensible to try to do more with less. We have to do things differently, and technology is an opportunity,” she said.

Working with Code for America in 2013, Oakland made RecordTrac, a website for requesting public records and tracking records requests. Obtaining government documents is often a convoluted process, but Ars Technica’s own Freedom of Information Act enthusiast Cyrus Farivar told me that RecordTrac “is the best (albeit imperfect) public records process I’ve ever used.”…

One of the best examples of a government agency using the Internet to engage residents comes from NASA. The space agency has had an online presence since the early years of the Web, said Brian Dunbar, who has been the content manager for nasa.gov since 1995.

The website has allowed NASA to distribute huge amounts of photos and videos from missions and broadcast an online TV service. There’s even live video feed of the Earth from the International Space Station.

NASA is all over social media, with nearly 700,000 subscribers to its YouTube channel, 13 millionTwitter followers, 13 million Facebook likes, 5.4 million Instagram followers, and a big presence on several other social networks. That’s not even including individuals like astronaut Scott Kelly, who has been tweeting from the International Space Station.

NASA has nearly 100 people editing its website, with content generally capitalizing on current events such as the recent Pluto flyby. NASA gets a lot of feedback when there are video problems, “but we’ve been lucky in that the problems have been not been overwhelming in either number or size, and we get a lot of positive feedback from the public,” Dunbar said.

This is all a natural extension of NASA’s core mission because the legislation that created the agency in 1958 charged it “with disseminating information about its programs to the widest extent practicable,” Dunbar said….(More)”

 

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”

What is Citizensourcing?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wietse Van Ransbeeck at CitizensLab: “Citizensourcing is the crowdsourcing practice applied by governments with the goal of tapping into the collective intelligence of the citizens. Through citizensourcing, governments can collect ideas, suggestions and opinions from their citizens — thereby creating a permanent feedback loop of communication.

Cities are a powerhouse of collective intelligence. Thanks to modern technologies, time has come to unlock the wisdom of the crowd. Tweet: Cities are powerhouses of collective intelligence - time to unlock them. via @citizenlabco http://ctt.ec/7e6Q2+

Yesterday

The current means of engaging citizens in public policy are in place since the 18th century: town hall meetings, in-person visits, phone calls or bureaucratic forms that allowed you to submit an idea. All of those ways of engagement are time-consuming, ineffective and expensive.

Great ideas and valuable feedback get lost, because those forms of engagement take too much effort for both citizens and cities. And next to that, communication happens in private between city government and citizens. Citizens cannot communicate with each other about how they want to improve their city.

Today

Advances in technology have restructured the way societies are organised; we’re living a digital age in which citizens are connected over networks. This creates unseen opportunities for cities to get closer to their citizens and serve them better. In the last years, we’ve seen several cities trying to build a strong online presence on social media channels.

Yet, they have discovered that communicating with their citizens over Twitter and Facebook is far from optimal. Messages get lost in the information overload that characterises those platforms, resulting in a lack of structured communication.

Tomorrow

Imagine that your town hall meetings could be held online… but then 24/7, accessible from every possible device. Citizensourcing on a dedicated platform is an inexpensive way for cities to get valuable input in the form of ideas, feedback and opinions from their citizens.

Whereas only a very small proportion of citizens engage in the time-consuming offline participation, an online platform allows you to multiply your reach by tenfolds. You reach an audience of citizens that you couldn’t reach before, which makes an online platform a well-needed complement for the already existing offline channels in every city.

When citizens can share their ideas in an easy and fun way and get rewarded for their valuable input, that’s when the wisdom of the crowd gets truly unlocked.

The most direct benefit for cities is clear: crowdsourcing new urban ideas drives superior innovations. At least as important as the fact that you offer a new channel for proposals, is that engagement leads to a better understanding of the different needs citizens have…..

There are several early success stories that show the gigantic potential though:

  • The Colombian city Medellín has its own crowdsourcing platform MiMedellín on which citizens share their urban solutions for problems the city faces. It turned out to be a big success: having collected more than 2,300 (!) posted ideas, the government is already developing policies with help from the creativity of citizens.
  • In the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, the city council succeeded in having their citizensourcing website Better Reykjavik used by over 60% of the citizens. Since Reykjavik implemented their city platform, they have spent €1.9 million on developing more than 200 projectsbased on ideas from citizens..
  • Paris held a participatory budgeting process, called ‘Madame Mayor, I have an idea’, that brought forward wonderful proejcts. To name one, after having received well over 20,000 votes, the city government announced to invest €2 million in vertical garden projects. Other popular ideas included gardens in schools, neighbourhood recycling centers and co-working spaces for students and entrepreneurs….(More)”

Setting Government Procurement Data Free

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Colin Wood in GovTech: “A new website may help drive down government procurement costs and make it easier for startups to sell their goods and services.

The website, called Open Procure, launched earlier this month and is the latest side project of Alan Mond, CEO and co-founder ofMunirent, the inter-jurisdictional equipment sharing service. Mond says the website is an experiment that he hopes will start conversations about procurement and ultimately prove beneficial for government and startups alike.

The website is simply a list of procurement thresholds for local and state government agencies nationwide. As of two weeks after launch, the website features thresholds for 59 agencies, many of which provide links to the original data sources. Users can see that in Boston, for instance, the city’s discretionary procurement threshold is $5,000 and the formal threshold is $25,000. So any startup wanting to sell goods or services to Boston — but avoid a public competitive bid process — can see that they need to keep their cost under $25,000. If they want to avoid competition altogether, they need to keep it under $5,000.

The website also creates a broader discussion around threshold inconsistency. In Philadelphia, for instance, the discretionary threshold is $32,000, compared to Boston’s $5,000, which means Philadelphia can procure without taking multiple bids on considerably larger projects. This is useful information for businesses, Mond pointed out, but also a conversation starter for the public sector. Do these disparities between different states, cities and counties exist for a good reason, or are they decided somewhat arbitrarily and left in the municipal code to rot?…(More)”

The Internet of Things: Frequently Asked Questions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric A. Fischer at the Congressional Research Service: “Internet of Things” (IoT) refers to networks of objects that communicate with other objects and with computers through the Internet. “Things” may include virtually any object for which remote communication, data collection, or control might be useful, such as vehicles, appliances, medical devices, electric grids, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing equipment, or building systems. In other words, the IoT potentially includes huge numbers and kinds of interconnected objects. It is often considered the next major stage in the evolution of cyberspace. Some observers believe it might even lead to a world where cyberspace and human space would seem to effectively merge, with unpredictable but potentially momentous societal and cultural impacts.

Two features makes objects part of the IoT—a unique identifier and Internet connectivity. Such “smart” objects each have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address to identify the object sending and receiving information. Smart objects can form systems that communicate among themselves, usually in concert with computers, allowing automated and remote control of many independent processes and potentially transforming them into integrated systems. Those systems can potentially impact homes and communities, factories and cities, and every sector of the economy, both domestically and globally. Although the full extent and nature of the IoT’s impacts remain uncertain, economic analyses predict that it will contribute trillions of dollars to economic growth over the next decade. Sectors that may be particularly affected include agriculture, energy, government, health care, manufacturing, and transportation.

The IoT can contribute to more integrated and functional infrastructure, especially in “smart cities,” with projected improvements in transportation, utilities, and other municipal services. The Obama Administration announced a smart-cities initiative in September 2015. There is no single federal agency that has overall responsibility for the IoT. Agencies may find IoT applications useful in helping them fulfill their missions. Each is responsible for the functioning and security of its own IoT, although some technologies, such as drones, may fall under the jurisdiction of other agencies as well. Various agencies also have relevant regulatory, sector-specific, and other mission-related responsibilities, such as the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Transportation, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission.

Security and privacy are often cited as major issues for the IoT, given the perceived difficulties of providing adequate cybersecurity for it, the increasing role of smart objects in controlling components of infrastructure, and the enormous increase in potential points of attack posed by the proliferation of such objects. The IoT may also pose increased risks to privacy, with cyberattacks potentially resulting in exfiltration of identifying or other sensitive information about an individual. With an increasing number of IoT objects in use, privacy concerns also include questions about the ownership, processing, and use of the data they generate….(More)”

Syrians discover new use for mobile phones – finding water

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Magdalena Mis at Reuters: “Struggling with frequent water cuts, residents of Syria‘s battered city of Aleppo have a new way to find the water needed for their daily lives – an interactive map on mobile phones.

The online map, created by the Red Cross and accessible through mobile phones with 3G technology, helps to locate the closest of over 80 water points across the divided city of 2 million and guides them to it using a Global Positioning System.

“The map is very simple and works on every phone, and everybody now has access to a mobile phone with 3G,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman Pawel Krzysiek told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview from Damascus on Wednesday.

“The important thing is that it’s not just a map – which many people may not know how to read – it’s the GPS that’s making a difference because people can actually be guided to the water point closest to them,” he said.

Aleppo was Syria’s most populated city and commercial hub before the civil war erupted in 2011, but many areas have been reduced to rubble and the city has been carved up between government forces and various insurgent groups.

Water cuts are a regular occurrence, amounting to about two weeks each month, and the infrastructure is on the brink of collapse, Krzysiek said.

The water supply was restored on Wednesday after a four-day cut caused by damage to the main power line providing electricity to some 80 percent of households, Krzysiek said.

More cuts are likely because fighting is preventing engineers from repairing the power line, and diesel, used for standby generators, may run out, he added….

Krzysiek said the ICRC started working on the map after a simple version created for engineers was posted on its Facebook page in the summer, sparking a wave of comments and requests.

“Suddenly people started to share this map and were sending comments on how to improve it and asking for a new, more detailed one.”

Krzysiek said that about 140,000 people were using the old version of the map and 20,000 had already used the new version, launched on Monday…(More)”