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Urban Tomography
Abstract
Urban Tomography is a novel application of mobile smartphone technology, designed to enable pervasive dense documentation of city life by many smartphone users at the same time and provide an automatically-archived historical record of places in time. Besides social-scientific inquiry and research, the system might enable community residents to document their own lives. We describe several pilot fieldwork applications in the use of Urban Tomography, providing insight into designing a system and protocols for conducting field documentation. We then discuss background, philosophy, and the technology of our system. Our website is: http://tomography.usc.edu.
... Our research also complements papers that have used online user-generated content to extract time-series data about consumer behavior ( [16]), health ( [17]; [18]), or finance ( [19]), or to obtain cross-sectional socioeconomic data ( [20]). A growing literature in urban tomography ( [21]) is demonstrating that adding geographical identification to such methods can improve research and practice in urban planning, urban sciences, environmental science or psychology, and architecture. For example, [22] shows the conditions under which user-generated opinions can be deemed reliable for planning decisions. ...
... They therefore complement the existing literature on the use of online, geotagged user-generated content in those contexts (e.g. [21,23,24]). ...
The aesthetic quality of the built environment is of paramount importance to the quality of life of an increasingly urbanizing population. However, a lack of data has hindered the development of comprehensive measures of perceived architectural beauty. In this paper, we demonstrate that the local frequency of geotagged photos posted by internet users in two photo-sharing websites strongly predict the beauty ratings of buildings. We conduct an independent beauty survey with respondents rating proprietary stock photos of 1,000 buildings across the United States. Buildings with higher ratings were found more likely to be geotagged with user-uploaded photos in both Google Maps and Flickr. This correlation also holds for the beauty rankings of raters who seldom upload materials to the internet. Objective architectural characteristics that predict higher average beauty ratings of buildings also positively covary with their internet photo frequency. These results validate the use of localized user-generated image uploads in photo-sharing sites to measure the aesthetic appeal of the urban environment in the study of architecture, real estate, urbanism, planning, and environmental psychology.
... Abdelzaher et al. [1] conclude the primary participatory sensing applications deeply. A number of early participatory sensing prototype systems have been built such as BikeNet [2], SoundSense [3], CenceMe [4,5], MetroSense [6], Bubble-Sensing [7], Urban Tomography [8,9], CarTel [10], Darwin [11], and Microblog [12] at the same time. These participatory sensing prototype systems lay the foundation of human sensing. ...
The mobile human social network actually might be the hugest and best “sensor network” because of the explosive growth in social network content. Nowadays, more and more mobile social applications offer a much easier way for people to share their feeling including vision, haptic, hearing, and smell with the location information by words, images, or even videos. These new sharing methods appearing in the mobile social network actually give us a precious chance to sense the world. Extra systems, which are specialized in particular sensing, do not need to be created any more. The specific sensing data can be acquired from the social network by handling the heterogeneous data. The contribution of this paper lies in developing a model that collects samples considering the relevancy from the perspective of location from different mobile social networks and estimating the occurrence likelihood of the perceived event with collected samples. The simulations and real-world case studies are also developed to verify the reliability of the model and the effectiveness of the Location Aware EM algorithm.
... Eriksson et al. proposed a mobile sensor network for road surface monitoring [19], and SoundSense [20] is a scalable sound sensing system for people-centric applications on mobile phones. Furthermore, Krieger et al. use smartphone sensors for urban tomography in social science research [21]. Abstractions and functionalities provided by our proposed SVM can be used to ease and expedite the development of such applications. ...
The vision of the
Internet of Things (IoT)
is coming closer to reality as a large number of embedded devices are introduced to our everyday environments. For many commercial IoT devices, ubiquitously connected mobile platforms can provide global connectivity and enable various applications. Nevertheless, the types of IoT resource-utilizing applications are still limited due to the traditional stovepipe software architecture, where the vendors provide supporting software on an end-to-end basis. This paper tries to address this issue by introducing the
Sensor Virtualization Module (SVM)
, which provides a software abstraction for external IoT objects and allows applications to easily utilize various IoT resources through open APIs. We implement the SVM on both Android and iOS and show that the SVM architecture can lead to easy development of applications. We envision that this simplification in application development will catalyze the development of various IoT services.
... Like a central nervous system, this storytelling network flows through the entire neighborhood, including the discourse of residents, local media, and community organizations. The focus on light-touch and flows is in contrast to the tendency for mobile media research to privilege smartphones and " dense documentation " (e.g., see Krieger et al., 2010 ). However, CIT emphasizes that the density of any one individual community member's story is less important than the broader discursive network of community members, local media, and organizations. ...
A delicate touch is required to empower neighborhoods using civic media. Funding is persistently scarce. Especially in marginalized neighborhoods, blunt designs can be counterproductive and even entrench complex problems. New metaphors may be needed to guide design and empower local neighborhoods. Urban acupuncture is used as the basis for this study, emphasizing a light-touch strategy that has shown success in Brazil with urban transit, and more recently in Europe with urban design. We specifically propose “neighborhood acupuncture” to address the local level, tapping the sociology of place-based communication. To investigate the implications for systematic design, a case study is probed in South Los Angeles using mobile media for community mapping. Using qualitative methods, three tactics were investigated for the potential to “poke” the network into action, including one to bridge diverse storytelling networks. Each tactic ultimately seeks to build the capacity for collective action around neighborhood issues. Acupuncture is broadly argued to sustain two design shifts: first to help approach neighborhoods as ecosystems, and second, to design for circulation rather than any single technology platform.
... As more and more computer chips and sensors are becoming integral parts of our homes, offices, shops, hospitals and neighbourhoods, GC will be better equipped with capabilities to model and track human and object movement in indoor as well as outdoor environments. The recent development of urban tomography (Krieger et al., 2010;Evans-Cowley, 2010) has enabled citizens to better document their lives spatiotemporally by capturing dense audiovisual records of urban phenomena, potentially linking both indoor and outdoor activities (Figure 16.6). ...
AbstrAct This chapter examines the implications of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) for GeoComputation (GC). As computing power has gradually embedded itself into the environment of our daily lives, we have witnessed the emergence of ubicomp and the concomitant growth of ambient intelligence during the past two decades. Ubicomp has contributed a new sentient environment in which the virtual and physical world, digital bits and atoms, people and objects can be linked and tracked. Ubicomp has also led to the spatial big data deluge, characterised by three Vs – volume, variety and velocity. The next phase of GC development should be conducted in the context of ubicomp and spatial big data. There are multiple challenges along computational, theoretical, social, political , legal and environmental fronts. To better address these challenges, an open GC paradigm is proposed in this chapter. Open GC calls for open data, open-source software, open standards and open collaboration.
... Additionally, it would matter that the thousand eyes knew something about cities and how they work and what might be of interest to others. M. Krieger et al. (2010) have begun experimenting with mobile phone video technology to document cities, providing the video on a Web site where users can view video of locations based on a map. This experiment is a starting point for exploring methodologies for the public to document the city and aid in city planning efforts. ...
The mobile phone has transformed life in the city. Using them, individuals can both receive information about their surroundings through location-based services and contribute to the city as a system. They can participate by sharing location, text, photos, or video about the conditions of the city. This article explores the literature surrounding mobile phone technology in urban planning and city life. Specifically, it explores the potential of mobile phones in sensing, documenting, and exploring the city. This article draws on literature from a wide variety of fields to create a overview of the issues surrounding mobile phones in the city. This article review what we know and what has been speculated about the influence of mobile phones and similar devices on urban life. There is evidence that they alter our sense of individuality, our mobility, our interactions with others, our capacity to participate in and document public life, and our senses of privacy and publicness. The implications and meanings for planning are open, as they were when the mails, the telegraph, and the telephone were first introduced.
The number of worldwide mobile device users is increasing rapidly, as are the number of applications to serve these devices. Urban planners have the opportunity to use a wide array of mobile applications to increase productivity, share information, and engage with the public. This chapter explores a number of mobile applications that can add value to the work that urban planners undertake. It also considers the types of applications that could be developed to assist planners in their efforts to understand cities and engage with the public.
This paper put forward a social relationship-based Mobilenode Location Prediction algorithm (SMLP) based on the existing scheme of mobile trace predication. This algorithm use the position of other nodes to update the prediction results based on the 1-order Markov model, and improve the accuracy of the prediction model by sparse of state transition matrix. Finally, we verify the feasibility of prediction modal based on the WTD dataset. The results show that the trajectory prediction modal based on social relationship can get better accuracy with than 1-order Markov prediction modal. Therefore, the algorithm has high value in practical application.
Mobile node trajectory prediction is a basis for effective data collection and data dissemination in opportunistic cognitive networks. A social-aware node mobile trajectory prediction algorithm was proposed, in which the location of other nodes were used to update the prediction results based on the 1-order Markov model, and the accuracy of the prediction model was improved by sparse of state transition matrix. Finally, the feasibility of prediction model was verified based on the UCSD WTD dataset. The results showed that the location prediction model based on social relationship could get better accuracy than that of the 1-order Markov prediction model. Therefore, the algorithm has high value in practical applications.
Mobile user location predication is critical to efficient data acquisition and message forwarding in participatory sensing systems. This paper proposes a Social-aware Mobile user Location Prediction algorithm (SMLP). The SMLP algorithm models application scenarios based on geographic locations, and extracting social relationships of mobile nodes from nodes' mobility. The SMLP algorithm preliminarily predicts node's mobility based on the Markov model, and then amends the prediction results using location information of other nodes which have strong relationship with the node. Two algorithms, SMLP1 and SMLPN, are proposed based on the Markov model and the weighted Markov model, respectively. Finally, the UCSD WTD data sets are exploited for simulations. Simulation results show that SMLP1 acquires higher prediction accuracy than the Markov model. SMLPN achieves more accuracy on prediction compared with SMLP1, and obtains comparable prediction accuracy with order-2 Markov model while presents extra lower algorithm complexity. Due to the introduction of weighting coefficients, both SMLP1 and SMLPNdemonstrate high flexibility.
The number of worldwide mobile device users is increasing rapidly, as are the number of applications to serve these devices. Urban planners have the opportunity to use an array of mobile applications to increase productivity, share information, and engage with the public. This article explores a number of mobile applications that can add value to the work that urban planners undertake. It also considers the types of applications that could be developed to assist planners in their efforts to understand cities and engage with the public.
Many emerging location-aware applications require position information. However, these applications rarely use celltower-based localization because of its inaccuracy, preferring instead to use the more energy-hungry GPS. In this paper, we present CAPS, a Cell-ID Aided Positioning System. CAPS leverages near-continuous mobility and the position history of a user to achieve significantly better accuracy than the celltower-based approach, while keeping energy overhead low. CAPS is designed based on the insight that users exhibit consistency in routes traveled, and that cell-ID transition points that the user experiences can, on a frequently traveled route, uniquely identify position. To this end, CAPS uses a cell-ID sequence matching technique to estimate current position based on the history of cell-ID and GPS position sequences that match the current cell-ID sequence. We have implemented CAPS on Android-based smartphones and have extensively evaluated it at different locations, and for different platforms and carriers. Our evaluation results show that CAPS can save more than 90% of the energy spent by the positioning system compared to the case where GPS is always used, while providing reasonably accurate position information with errors less than 20% of the celltower-based scheme.
Many emerging smartphone applications require position information to provide location-based or context-aware services. In these applications, GPS is often preferred over its alternatives such as GSM/WiFi based positioning systems because it is known to be more accurate. However, GPS is extremely power hungry. Hence a common approach is to periodically duty-cycle GPS. However, GPS duty-cycling trades-off positioning accuracy for lower energy. A key requirement for such applications, then, is a positioning system that provides accurate position information while spending minimal energy. In this paper, we present RAPS, rate-adaptive positioning system for smartphone applications. It is based on the observation that GPS is generally less accurate in urban areas, so it suffices to turn on GPS only as often as necessary to achieve this accuracy. RAPS uses a collection of techniques to cleverly determine when to turn on GPS. It uses the location-time history of the user to estimate user velocity and adaptively turn on GPS only if the estimated uncertainty in position exceeds the accuracy threshold. It also efficiently estimates user movement using a duty-cycled accelerometer, and utilizes Bluetooth communication to reduce position uncertainty among neighboring devices. Finally, it employs celltower-RSS blacklisting to detect GPS unavailability (e.g., indoors) and avoid turning on GPS in these cases. We evaluate RAPS through real-world experiments using a prototype implementation on a modern smartphone and show that it can increase phone lifetimes by more than a factor of 3.8 over an approach where GPS is always on.
Planners have widely used photographs in their research; unfortunately, much of the use of visual images has been for illustrative purposes rather than for establishing empirical observations. The goal of this paper is to move planners' use of photographic images from illustrations ("Isn't this image interesting") to empirical data ("This image provides evidence that ... "). To achieve the goal of removing planners' ignorance of image-based research, this paper divides the realm of photographic research into three sections. The paper begins with an ontological discussion of the properties of visual images, followed by a detailed evaluation of the various threats to validity in photographic research. The second section looks at the necessary research design requirements that would allow planners to incorporate empirical images within a larger research project. The paper concludes with a discussion of visual-based field research of Manhattan's 14th Street vendors' market in New York City.
and abstractly. The unstated assumption,is that “to read and write” means,to read and write text. Although media and com- puter literacy are occasionally mentioned in these definitions, media literacy is most often defined as the ability to understand how television and film manipulate viewers, and computer liter- acy is generally defined as the,skills to use,a computer,to per- form various tasks, such as accessing the Web. If I also ask peo- ple about the nature of language, I usually receive the response that language enables us to conceptualize ideas, to abstract in- formation, and to receive and share knowledge. The underlying assumption, so accepted that it is never stated, is that language means,words. Twenty-five years ago, a rather popular book was entitled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television., Clearly, that vision of the world was not realized: television has not been eliminated, 169 and screens—from,television screens to computer,screens— now dominate,our lives. This reality needs to be acknowledged. So, in the spirit of the title of the earlier book, I’d like to suggest four arguments,for an expanded definition of literacy: 1. The multimedia,language of the screen has become,the
This paper introduces the concept of participatory sensing, which tasks everyday mobile devices, such as cellular phones, to form interactive, participatory sensor networks that enable public and professional users to gather, analyze and share local knowledge. An initial architecture to enhance data credibility, quality, privacy and 'shareability' in such networks is described, as well as a campaign application model that encompasses participation at personal, social and urban scales. Example applications are outlined in four areas: urban planning, public health, cultural identity and creative expression, and natural resource management.
Many applications are enabled by the ability to capture videos on a smartphone and to have these videos uploaded to an Internet-connected server. This capability requires the transfer of large volumes of data from the phone to the infrastructure. Smartphones have multiple wireless interfaces -- 3G/EDGE and WiFi -- for data transfer, but there is considerable variability in the availability and achievable data transfer rate for these networks. Moreover, the energy costs for transmitting a given amount of data on these wireless interfaces can differ by an order of magnitude. On the other hand, many of these applications are often naturally delay-tolerant, so that it is possible to delay data transfers until a lower-energy WiFi connection becomes available. In this paper, we present a principled approach for designing an optimal online algorithm for this energy-delay tradeoff using the Lyapunov optimization framework. Our algorithm, called SALSA, can automatically adapt to channel conditions and requires only local information to decide whether and when to defer a transmission. We evaluate SALSA using real-world traces as well as experiments using a prototype implementation on a modern smartphone. Our results show that SALSA can be tuned to achieve a broad spectrum of energy-delay tradeoffs, is closer to an empirically-determined optimal than any of the alternatives we compare it to, and, can save 10-40% of battery capacity for some workloads.
Aerial photography has many advantages as a way of representing space, particularly when photos are shot at oblique angles and at relatively low altitudes. The images show real conditions, not simulations. They are understandable to people with no technical training, in a way that zoning maps and codes, satellite surveys, and traditional site plans are not. The aerials usually show entire landscapes, both land and buildings. They can create a more complete visual inventory than groundlevel shots. They reveal inaccessible places like wetlands and steep terrain, or deliberately hidden sites like dumps and gated communities. They can display the vast scale typical of 21st century development, with up-to-the-minute data on the progress of sprawl. If shot from altitudes of 1,000 to 2,000 feet, they can show building facades as well as massing.
This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.
Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of "Fifty Books for Our Time." For sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion. Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so fast-and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the pedestrian traffic stream? Why do places designed primarily for security actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing? "The city is full of vexations," Whyte avers: "Steps too steep; doors too tough to open; ledges you cannot sit on. . . . It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces." Yet Whyte finds encouragement in the widespread rediscovery of the city center. The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where people come together face-to-face.
In disputes over urban development, arguments frequently hinge not on what is, but on what could be. Using a detailed case study of one debate over urban expansion in Sydney (Australia), this paper explores a class of images frequently used in planning and growth debates: describing the future of an urban development with the name or picture of another place. In this debate the images of three cities - Los Angeles, Toronto, and Canberra - were used by professionals and activists to portray desirable or frightening futures for the location. As a form of metaphor and synecdoche, these city images were both appealing and highly selective. Explicitly about one aspect of the cities, such as smog, they simultaneously evoked wider associations, such as materialism. Shaped by the strong television presence of Los Angeles and Canberra, they however had a regional flavor appealing to selective perceptions of these distant places. They were generally empowering for professionals and activists, leaving a role for individual human agents - if relatively elite professionals and activists - to shape city form. Although developed in a particular growth debate these metaphors are of a common type, are used across the political spectrum, and raise crucial questions about the character of urban design debates.
Planners, and teachers and students of planning, ought systematically to document ordinary urban phenomena: store-front churches, vernacular visual merchandising, industry,... Careful archiving and indexing is crucial. For long-lasting records, photographic film still provides the best medium for still photographs; digital video and audio are probably best for motion pictures and sound.
To augment the economic and political analysis of cities which is the traditional content of urban planning curricula, the authors developed a course titled Cinema City. The objective of the course is to expand the students' understanding of both how people respond to life in cities and how this response is in fact influenced by the images they see depicted in film. Striking arguments can be made that our willingness to address urban problems is influenced by our history of such popular images. This paper outlines the authors' experience with the course, indicating both the pedagogical benefits and scholarly value of such an approach.
This paper proposes a cinematic technique-based method for teaching urban design studios to improve students' appreciation of the connection between the human cognitive-sensorial system (the human sensorium) and the environmental qualities of public spaces (the urban sensorium). Students learn how to do street analysis by way of flâneurie and using audio–video devices; how to use cinematic storyboarding as part of the design process; and how to present the final project as a movie (in addition to a physical model and drawings). A pedagogical goal of the studio is to sharpen the designer's mental and cognitive skills necessary to establish sensorial relationships between people and the built environment, and to present such relationships in the optimum media.
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
This article assesses the sources and consequences of public disorder. Based on the videotaping and systematic rating of more than 23,000 street segments in Chicago, highly reliable scales of social and physical disorder for 196 neighborhoods are constructed. Census data, police records, and an independent survey of more than 3,500 residents are then integrated to test a theory of collective efficacy and structural constraints. Defined as cohesion among residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of public space, collective efficacy explains lower rates of crime and observed disorder after controlling neighborhood structural characteristics. Collective efficacy is also linked to lower rates of violent crime after accounting for disorder and the reciprocal effects of violence. Contrary to the "broken windows" theory, however, the relationship between public disorder and crime is spurious except perhaps for robbery. Sociology
Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot expresses the hopes, dogmas, assumptions, and prejudices that have come to characterize the French Enlightenment. In this preface to the Encyclopedia, d'Alembert traces the history of intellectual progress from the Renaissance to 1751. Including a revision of Diderot's Prospectus and a list of contributors to the Encyclopedia, this edition, elegantly translated and introduced by Professor Richard Schwab, is one of the great works of the Enlightenment and an outstanding introduction to the philosophes.
Estudio que presenta un acercamiento a la fenomenología, corriente filosófica impulsada por el filósofo alemán Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), cuyo propósito es analizar los actos intencionales y a la realidad fenoménica tal como se presenta en su realidad originaria. El autor enriquece sus planteamientos a través de las aplicaciones prácticas de esta corriente de pensamiento.
If You Could See What I Know
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A Dozen 'Tamales!' Documenting the Aural Urban Sensorium Audio supplement at Pervasive Urban Media Documentation
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Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin
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