Ruth Graham at Boston Globe: “What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules. At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert... (More >)
Crowdsourcing Parking Lot Occupancy using a Mobile Phone Application
Paper by Davami, Erfan; Sukthankar, Gita available at ASE@360: “Participatory sensing is a specialized form of crowdsourcing for mobile devices in which the users act as sensors to report on local environmental conditions. • This poster describes the process of prototyping a mobile phone crowdsourcing app for monitoring parking availability on a large university campus. • We present a case study of how an agent-based urban model can be used to perform a sensitivity analysis of the comparative susceptibility of different data fusion paradigms to potentially troublesome user behaviors: 1. Poor user enrollment, 2. Infrequent usage, 3. A preponderance... (More >)
Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)
As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org. Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution,... (More >)
Predicting crime, LAPD-style
The Guardian: “The Los Angeles Police Department, like many urban police forces today, is both heavily armed and thoroughly computerised. The Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division in downtown LA is its central processor. Rows of crime analysts and technologists sit before a wall covered in video screens stretching more than 10 metres wide. Multiple news broadcasts are playing simultaneously, and a real-time earthquake map is tracking the region’s seismic activity. Half-a-dozen security cameras are focused on the Hollywood sign, the city’s icon. In the centre of this video menagerie is an oversized satellite map showing some of the... (More >)
Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong
Book chapter by S. Grauwin, S. Sobolevsky, S. Moritz, I. Gódor, C. Ratti, to be published in “Computational Approaches for Urban Environments” (Springer Ed.), October 2014: “This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity profile and land usage in three global cities: New York, London and Hong Kong. By comparing whole cities typical... (More >)
The Emerging Power of Big Data
New America Foundation Report on the Chicago experience of using big data: “Big data is transforming the commercial marketplace but it also has the potential to reshape government affairs and urban development. In a new report from the Emerging Leaders Program at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, Lincoln S. Ellis, a founding member of the World Economic Roundtable, and other authors from the Emerging Leaders Program, explore how big data can be used by mega-cities to meet the challenges they face in an age of resource constraints to improve the lives of their residents. Using Chicago as a... (More >)
App pays commuters to take routes that ease congestion
Springwise: “Congestion at peak hours is a major problem in the world’s busiest city centres. We’ve recently seen Gothenburg in Sweden offering free bicycles to ease the burden on public transport services, but now a new app is looking to take a different approach to the same problem. Urban Engines uses algorithms to help cities determine key congestion choke points and times, and can then reward commuters for avoiding them. The Urban Engines system is based on commuters using the smart commuter cards already found in many major cities. The company tracks journeys made with those commuter cards, and... (More >)
Lawsuit Would Force IRS to Release Nonprofit Tax Forms Digitally
Suzanne Perry at the Chronicle of Philanthropy on how “Open Data Could Shine a Light on Pay and Lobbying”: “Nonprofits that want to find out what their peers are doing can find a wealth of information in the forms the groups must file each year with the Internal Revenue Service—how much they pay their chief executives, how much they spend on fundraising, who is on their boards, where they offer services. But the way the IRS makes those data available harkens to the digital dark ages, and critics who want to overhaul the system have been shaking up the... (More >)
Putting Open Data to Work for Communities
Report by Kathryn L.S. Pettit, Leah Hendey, Brianna Losoya, G. Thomas Kingsley at the Urban Institute: “The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a network of local organizations that collect, organize, and use neighborhood data to tackle issues in their communities. As the movement for government transparency has spread at the local level, more NNIP partners are participating in the call for governments to release data and are using open data to provide information for decisionmaking and community engagement. Local NNIP partners and open data advocates have complementary strengths and should work together to more effectively advance open government... (More >)
In Defense of Transit Apps
Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: “The civic technology community has a love-hate relationship with transit apps. We love to, and often do, use the example of open transit data and the cottage industry of civic app development it has helped spawn as justification for governments releasing open data. Some of the earliest, most enduring and most successful civic applications have been built on transit data and there literally hundreds of different apps available. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), which has helped to encourage the release of transit data from dozens and dozens of transportation authorities across the country,... (More >)