Tuesday, March 17. 2009Mapping a City's RhythmA phone application highlights hot spots and will soon show where different urban "tribes" gather.
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By Kate Greene
While this sort of behavior is common knowledge, it hasn't been visible to the average person. Sense Networks, a startup based in New York, is now trying to bring this side of a city to life. Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, the startup's software produces a heat map that shows activity at hot spots across a city. Currently, the service, called Citysense, only works in San Francisco, but it will launch in New York in the next few months. On Wednesday, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Jose, CA, Tony Jebara, chief scientist for Sense Networks and a professor at Columbia University, detailed plans of a forthcoming update to Citysense that shows not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns--students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance--are congregating. A user downloads Citysense to her phone to view the map and can choose whether or not to allow the application to track her own location. The idea, says Jebara, is that a person could travel to a new city, launch Citysense on her phone, and instantly get a feel for which neighborhoods she might want to spend the evening visiting. This information could also help her filter restaurant or bar suggestions from online recommendation services like Yelp. Equally important, from the company's business perspective, advertisers would have a better idea of where and when to advertise to certain groups of people. Citysense, which has access to four million GPS sensors, currently offers simple statistics about a city, says Jebara. It shows, for instance, whether the overall activity in the city is above or below normal (Sense Networks' GPS data indicates that activity in San Francisco is down 34 percent since October) or whether a particular part of town has more or less activity than usual. But the next version of the software, due out in a couple of months, will help users dig more deeply into this data. It will reveal the movement of people with certain behavior patterns. "It's like Facebook, but without the self-reporting," Jebara says, meaning that a user doesn't need to actively update her profile. "We want an honest social network where you're connected to someone because you colocate." In other words, if you live in San Francisco and go to Starbucks at 4 P.M. a couple of times a week, you probably have some similarities with someone in New York who also visits Starbucks at around the same time. Knowing where a person in New York goes to dinner on a Friday night could help a visitor to the city make a better restaurant choice, Jebara says. As smart phones with GPS sensors become more popular, companies and researchers have clamored to make sense of all the data that this can reveal. Sense Networks is a part of a research trend known as reality mining, pioneered by Alex Pentland of MIT, who is a cofounder of Sense Networks. Another example of reality mining is a research project at Intel that uses cell phones to determine whether a person is the hub of a social network or at the periphery, based on her tone of voice and the amount of time she talks. Jebara is aware that the idea of tracking people's movements makes some people uncomfortable, but he insists that the data used is stripped of all identifying information. In addition, anyone who uses Citysense must first agree to let the system log her position. A user can also, at any time, delete her data from the Sense Networks database, Jebara says. Part of Sense Networks' business plan involves providing GPS data about city activity to advertisers, Jebara says. But again, this does not mean revealing an individual's whereabouts--just where certain types of people congregate and when. For instance, Sense Networks' data-analysis algorithms may show that a particular demographic heads to bars downtown between 6 and 9 P.M. on weekdays. Advertisers could then tailor ads on a billboard screen to that specific crowd. So far, Jebara says, Sense Networks has categorized 20 types, or "tribes," of people in cities, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." These tribes are determined using three types of data: a person's "flow," or movements around a city; publicly available data concerning the company addresses in a city; and demographic data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. If a person spends the evening in a certain neighborhood, it's more likely that she lives in that neighborhood and shares some of its demographic traits. By analyzing these types of data, engineers at Sense Networks can determine the probability that a user will visit a certain type of location, like a coffee shop, at any time. Within a couple of weeks, says Jebara, the matrix provides a reliable probability of the type of place--not the exact place or location--that a person will be at any given hour in a week. The probability is constantly updated, but in general, says Jebara, most people's behavior does not vary dramatically from day to day. Sense Networks is exploring what GPS data can reveal about behavior, says Eric Paulos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. "It's interesting to see things like this, [something] that was just research a few years ago, coming to the market," he adds. Paulos says it will be important to make sure that people are aware of what data is being used and how, but he predicts that more and more companies are going to find ways to make use of the digital bread crumbs we leave behind. "It's going to happen," he says. Copyright Technology Review 2009.
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Territory
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11:37
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, mapping, monitoring, science & technology, surveillance, territory, urbanism
BBC: “Social networks ‘are new e-mail’ “‘Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard’. [wikipedia] [tweetsearch] “We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0,” David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said. Tens of millions of people are using social networks to stay in touch. (..) “The complex nuances of relationships on social networks, with users having different degrees of openness with different friends or followers, further complicates the introduction of standards“. read more at Darren Waters BBC News Technology item ----- Via Smart Mobs 20 years of the first paper about the World Wide WebYesterday I attended “World Wide Web@20″ at CERN in Geneva where Web founders celebrated the 20 years of the “Original proposal for a global hypertext project at CERN” (1989). Tim Berners-Lee, Ben Segal, Jean-Francois Groff, Robert Cailliau and others gave a set of talks about the history and the future of the Web. The afternoon was quite dense inside the CERN globe and I won’t summarize every talks. I only wanted to write down the set of insights I collected there. First about the history:
The future part was very targeted at W3C thinking about the web future. As Berners-Lee mentioned “the Web is just the tip of the iceberg, new changes are gonna rock the boat even more, there are all kinds of things we’ve never imagined, we still have an agenda (as the W3C)”. The first point he mentioned was the importance for governments and public bodies to release public data on the web and let people have common initiative such as collaborative data (a la open street map). His second point here was about the complexity of the Web today:
And eventually, the last part was about the Semantic Web, the main direction Tim Berners-Lee (he and the team of colleagues he invited in a panel) wanted to focus on for the end of the afternoon. From a foresight researchers standpoint, it was quite intriguing to see that the discussion about the future of the Web was, above all, about this direction. Berners-Lee repeated that the Semantic Web will happen eventually: “when you put an exponential graph on an axis, it can continue during a lot of time, depending on the scale… you never know the tipping point but it will happen“. The “Web of data” as they called it was in the plan from the start (”if you want to understand what will happen, go read the first documents, it’s not mystical tracks, it’s full of clever ideas“): we now have the link between documents and the link between documents and people or between people themselves is currently addressed. Following this, a series of presentation about different initiatives dealt with:
The last part of the day was about the threats and limits:
Why do I blog this? The whole afternoon was quite refreshing as it’s always curious to see a bunch of old friends explaining and arguing about the history of what they created. It somewhat reminded me how the beginning of the Web as really shaped by:
What is perhaps even more intriguing was that I felt to what extent how their vision of the future was still grounded and shaped by their early vision and by their aims. Their objective, as twenty years ago, is still to “help people finding content, documents and services”, the early utopia of Memex/Arpanet/Internet/Xanadu/the Web. The fact that most of the discussion revolved around the Semantic Web indicates how much of these three elements had an important weight for the future. Or, how the past frames the discussants’ vision of the future. Curiously enough the discussion did not deal with the OTHER paths and usage the Web has taken. Of course they talked briefly about Web2.0 because this meme is a new instantiation of their early vision but they did not comment on other issues. An interesting symptom of this was their difficulty in going beyond the “access paradigm” as if the important thing was to allow “access”, “answers” and linkage between documents (or people). This is not necessarily a critique, it’s just that I was impressed by how their original ideas were so persistent that they still shape their vision of the future. ----- Via Pasta & Vinegar (Nicolas Nova) Personal comment: Outre le passé du web (et cela reste toujours une histoire intéressante à entendre, comment les choses sont apparues, etc.), quelques pistes ici sur l'avenir possible de notre "grand réseau" avec lequel nous vivons désormais en symbiose et co-développement. Collaborative ServicesSocial innovation and design for sustainability - Eivind Stø, Pål Strandbakken, John Thackara, Victoria Thoresen, Stefanie Un, Edina Vadovics, Philine Warnke, Adriana Zacarias. "What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?" A new book, edited by Francois Jegou and Ezio Manzini (with a chapter by me in it) attempts to answer some of these questions. Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability suggests a variety of scenarios: Car-sharing on demand, micro-leasing system for tools between neighbours, shared sewing studio, home restaurant, delivery service between users who exchange goods… The scenarios looks at how these kinds of daily life activities could be performed by structured services that rely on a greater collaboration of individuals amongst themselves. ----- Related Links:Personal comment: Téléchargeable directement en ligne sous forme de pdf, le livre présente tout une série de stratégies pour "vivre à moindre coût énergétique", à titre individuel ou en groupe. John Tackara (Doors of Percpetion) y contribue. Une ressource, gratuite, à faire circuler.
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