Book by Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Laurent Hérault, and Hideyuki Tokuda: “Smart cities are a new vision for urban development. They integrate information and communication technology infrastructures – in the domains of artificial intelligence, distributed and cloud computing, and sensor networks – into a city, to facilitate quality of life for its citizens and sustainable growth. This book explores various concepts for the development of these new technologies (including agent-oriented programming, broadband infrastructures, wireless sensor networks, Internet-based networked applications, open data and open platforms), and how they can provide smart services and enablers in a range of public domains.
The most significant research, both established and emerging, is brought together to enable academics and practitioners to investigate the possibilities of smart cities, and to generate the knowledge and solutions required to develop and maintain them…(More)”
Lewis Mitchell at the Conversation: “Since its public launch 10 years ago, Twitter has been used as a social networking platform among friends, an instant messaging service for smartphone users and a promotional tool for corporations and politicians.
But it’s also been an invaluable source of data for researchers and scientists – like myself – who want to study how humans feel and function within complex social systems.
By analyzing tweets, we’ve been able to observe and collect data on the social interactions of millions of people “in the wild,” outside of controlled laboratory experiments.
So how, exactly, did Twitter become such a unique resource for computational social scientists? And what has it allowed us to discover?
Twitter’s biggest gift to researchers
On July 15, 2006, Twittr (as it was then known) publiclylaunched as a “mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS.” The ability to send free 140-character group texts drove many early adopters (myself included) to use the platform.
With time, the number of users exploded: from 20 million in 2009 to 200 million in 2012 and 310 million today. Rather than communicating directly with friends, users would simply tell their followers how they felt, respond to news positively or negatively, or crack jokes.
For researchers, Twitter’s biggest gift has been the provision of large quantities of open data. Twitter was one of the first major social networks to provide data samples through something called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which enable researchers to query Twitter for specific types of tweets (e.g., tweets that contain certain words), as well as information on users.
This led to an explosion of research projects exploiting this data. Today, a Google Scholar search for “Twitter” produces six million hits, compared with five million for “Facebook.” The difference is especially striking given that Facebook has roughly five times as many users as Twitter (and is two years older).
Twitter’s generous data policy undoubtedly led to some excellent free publicity for the company, as interesting scientific studies got picked up by the mainstream media.
Studying happiness and health
With traditional census data slow and expensive to collect, open data feeds like Twitter have the potential to provide a real-time window to see changes in large populations.
The University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab was founded in 2006 and studies problems across applied mathematics, sociology and physics. Since 2008, the Story Lab has collected billions of tweets through Twitter’s “Gardenhose” feed, an API that streams a random sample of 10 percent of all public tweets in real time.
I spent three years at the Computational Story Lab and was lucky to be a part of many interesting studies using this data. For example, we developed a hedonometer that measures the happiness of the Twittersphere in real time. By focusing on geolocated tweets sent from smartphones, we were able to map the happiest places in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found Hawaii to be the happiest state and wine-growing Napa the happiest city for 2013.
A map of 13 million geolocated U.S. tweets from 2013, colored by happiness, with red indicating happiness and blue indicating sadness.PLOS ONE, Author provided
These studies had deeper applications: Correlating Twitter word usage with demographics helped us understand underlying socioeconomic patterns in cities. For example, we could link word usage with health factors like obesity, so we built a lexicocalorimeter to measure the “caloric content” of social media posts. Tweets from a particular region that mentioned high-calorie foods increased the “caloric content” of that region, while tweets that mentioned exercise activities decreased our metric. We found that this simple measure correlates with other health and well-being metrics. In other words, tweets were able to give us a snapshot, at a specific moment in time, of the overall health of a city or region.
Henry Farrell at SSRC: “The politics of social science access to data are shifting rapidly in the United States as in other developed countries. It used to be that states were the most important source of data on their citizens, economy, and society. States needed to collect and aggregate large amounts of information for their own purposes. They gathered this directly—e.g., through censuses of individuals and firms—and also constructed relevant indicators. Sometimes state agencies helped to fund social science projects in data gathering, such as the National Science Foundation’s funding of the American National Election Survey over decades. While scholars such as James Scott and John Brewer disagreed about the benefits of state data gathering, they recognized the state’s primary role.
In this world, the politics of access to data were often the politics of engaging with the state. Sometimes the state was reluctant to provide information, either for ethical reasons (e.g. the privacy of its citizens) or self-interest. However, democratic states did typically provide access to standard statistical series and the like, and where they did not, scholars could bring pressure to bear on them. This led to well-understood rules about the common availability of standard data for many research questions and built the foundations for standard academic practices. It was relatively easy for scholars to criticize each other’s work when they were drawing on common sources. This had costs—scholars tended to ask the kinds of questions that readily available data allowed them to ask—but also significant benefits. In particular, it made research more easily reproducible.
We are now moving to a very different world. On the one hand, open data initiatives in government are making more data available than in the past (albeit often without much in the way of background resources or documentation).The new universe of private data is reshaping social science research in some ways that are still poorly understood. On the other, for many research purposes, large firms such as Google or Facebook (or even Apple) have much better data than the government. The new universe of private data is reshaping social science research in some ways that are still poorly understood. Here are some of the issues that we need to think about:…(More)”
Data Driven Journalism: “A new project has developed an innovative means to approximate socioeconomic indicators by analyzing the network of international postal flows.
The project used 14 million aggregated electronic postal records from 187 countries collected by the Universal Postal Union over a four-year period (2010-2014) to create an international network showing the way post flows around the world.
In addition, the project builds upon previous research efforts using global flow networks, derived from the five following open data sources:
To understand these connections in the context of socioeconomic indicators, the researchers then compared these positions to the values of GDP, Life expectancy, Corruption Perception Index, Internet penetration rate, Happiness index, Gini index, Economic Complexity Index, Literacy, Poverty, CO2 emissions, Fixed phone line penetration, Mobile phone users, and the Human Development Index.
Image: Spearman rank correlations between global flow network degrees and socioeconomic indicators (CC BY 4.0).
From this analysis, the researchers revealed that:
The best-performing degree, in terms of consistently high performance across indicators is the global degree, suggesting that looking at how well connected a country is in the global multiplex can be more indicative of its socioeconomic profile as a whole than looking at single networks.
GDP per capita and life expectancy are most closely correlated with the global degree, closely followed by the postal, trade and IP weighed degrees – indicative of a relationship between national wealth and the flow of goods and information.
Similarly to GDP, the rate of poverty of a country is best represented by the global degree, followed by the postal degree. The negative correlation indicates that the more impoverished a country is, the less well connected it is to the rest of the world.
Low human development (high rank) is most highly negatively correlated with the global degree, followed by the postal, trade and IP degrees. This shows that high human development (low rank) is associated with high global connectivity and activity in terms of incoming and outgoing flows of information and goods. ….Read the fully study here.”
“These case studies were developed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in association with the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS).
Anyang, KoreaAnyang, a 600,000 population city near Seoul is developing international recognition on its smart city project that has been implemented incrementally since 2003. This initiative began with the Bus Information System to enhance citizen’s convenience at first, and has been expanding its domain into wider Intelligent Transport System as well as crime and disaster prevention in an integrated manner. Anyang is considered a benchmark for smart city with a 2012 Presidential Award in Korea and receives large number of international visits. Anyang’s Integrated Operation and Control Center (IOCC) acts as the platform that gathers, analyzes and distributes information for mobility, disasters management and crime. Anyang is currently utilizing big data for policy development and is continuing its endeavor to expand its smart city services into areas such as waste and air quality management. Download Anyang case study
Medellín, ColombiaMedellin is a city that went from being known for its security problems to being an international referent of technological and social innovation, urban transformation, equity, and citizen participation. This report shows how Medellin has implemented a series of strategies that have made it a smart city that is developing capacity and organic structure in the entities that control mobility, the environment, and security. In addition, these initiatives have created mechanisms to communicate and interact with citizens in order to promote continuous improvement of smart services.
Through the Program “MDE: Medellin Smart City,” Medellin is implementing projects to create free Internet access zones, community centers, a Mi-Medellin co-creation portal, open data, online transactions, and other services. Another strategy is the creation of the Smart Mobility System which, through the use of technology, has achieved a reduction in the number of accidents, improvement in mobility, and a reduction in incident response time. Download Medellin case study
Nesta: “This paper by Mor Rubinstein (Open Knowledge International) and Josh Cowls and Corinne Cath (Oxford Internet Institute) explores the methods and motivations behind innovative uses of open government data in five specific country contexts – Chile, Argentine, Uruguay, Israel, and Denmark; and considers how the insights it uncovers might be adopted in a UK context.
Through a series of interviews with ‘social hackers’ and open data practitioners and experts in countries with recognised open government data ‘hubs’, the authors encountered a diverse range of practices and approaches in how actors in different sectors of society make innovative uses of open government data. This diversity also demonstrated how contextual factors shape the opportunities and challenges for impactful open government data use.
Based on insights from these international case studies, the paper offers a number of recommendations – around community engagement, data literacy and practices of opening data – which aim to support governments and citizens unlock greater knowledge exchange and social impact through open government data….(More)”
Book by Manuel Stagars: “This book explores the power of greater openness, accountability, and transparency in digital information and government data for the nations of Southeast Asia. The author demonstrates that, although the term “open data” seems to be self-explanatory, it involves an evolving ecosystem of complex domains. Through empirical case studies, this book explains how governments in the ASEAN may harvest the benefits of open data to maximize their productivity, efficiency and innovation. The book also investigates how increasing digital divides in the population, boundaries to civil society, and shortfalls in civil and political rights threaten to arrest open data in early development, which may hamper post-2015 development agendas in the region. With robust open data policies and clear roadmaps, member states of the ASEAN can harvest the promising opportunities of open data in their particular developmental, institutional and legal settings. Governments, policy makers, entrepreneurs and academics will gain a clearer understanding of the factors that enable open data from this timely research….(More)”
Katherine M. A. Reilly and Juan P. Alperin at Global Media Journal: “Open Development (OD) is a subset of ICT4D that studies the potential of ITenabled openness to support social change among poor or marginalized populations. Early OD work examined the potential of IT-enabled openness to decentralize power and enable public engagement by disintermediating knowledge production and dissemination. However, in practice, intermediaries have emerged to facilitate open data and related knowledge production activities in development processes. We identify five models of intermediation in OD work: decentralized, arterial, ecosystem, bridging, and communities of practice and examine the implications of each for stewardship of open processes. We conclude that studying OD through these five forms of intermediation is a productive way of understanding whether and how different patterns of knowledge stewardship influence development outcomes. We also offer suggestions for future research that can improve our understanding of how to sustain openness, facilitate public engagement, and ensure that intermediation contributes to open development….(More)”
Springwise: “Creating good transit apps can be difficult, given the vast amount of city (and worldwide) data app builders need to have access to. Aiming to address this, Transitland is an open platform that aggregates publicly available transport information from around the world.
The startup cleans the data sets, making them easy-to-use, and adds them to Mapzen, an open source mapping platform. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn is the platform’s transport planning service that, following its latest expansion, now contains data from more than 200 regions around the world on every continent except Antarctica. Transitland encourages anyone interested in transport, data and mapping to get involved, from adding data streams to sharing new apps and analyses. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn also manages all licensing related to use of the data, leaving developers free to discover and build. The platform is available to use for free.
We have seen a platform enable data sharing to help local communities and governments work better together, as well as a startup that visualizes government data so that it is easy-to-use for entrepreneurs….(More)”
Digital Communities Special Report: “With urban areas continuing to grow at a substantial rate — from 30 percent of the world’s population in 1930 to a projected 66 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations — getting the urban experience right has become paramount. To help understand the building blocks to a successful digital city, The Digital Communities Special Report looks at five key technologies — broadband, open data, GIS, CRM and analytics — and provides a window into how they are helping city governments cope with economic, educational and societal demands.
The good news is that these essential technologies are getting cheaper, faster and better all the time. But technologies like these still cost money, need talent to run them and are dependent on the right policies if they are going to succeed. In other words, digital cities need smart thinking in order to work. Part one of this series examines the importance of broadband as a critical infrastructure and the challenges cities face in reaching universal adoption.
