FEATURE22 December 2017

Street smart: Using sensory data to improve city mapping

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A team of scientists has developed an algorithm to include sensory data in a city mapping application so people can choose a route that makes them most happy. Jane Bainbridge reports.

Sangaku

Urban living can have its pitfalls – noise, congestion, crowds and big commutes – all resulting in annoyed and exasperated city dwellers. While city mapping has helped with route planning, the focus of these apps is invariably efficiency – getting from A to B in the quickest time possible. 

Now scientists have joined forces to rethink this type of mapping, and instead of focusing on time-saving, have considered journeys in terms of pleasure and wellbeing.

Luca Maria Aiello, a social media and computational social scientist at Nokia Bell Labs, is one of them, and has collaborated with Daniele Quercia and Rossano Schifanella to work on their project, goodcitylife.org.

“This work started back in 2014 when the three of us were working at Yahoo Barcelona. Daniele was initially working in the computational urbanism area and Rossano and I were working more in social media mining, ” explains Aiello. “We wanted to provide some tools that not only maximise efficiency but also maximise the ...