A Simple Baseline for Travel Time Estimation using Large-Scale Trip Data

The increased availability of large-scale trajectory data around the world provides rich information for the study of urban dynamics. For example, New York City Taxi Limousine Commission regularly releases source-destination information about trips in the taxis they regulate. Taxi data provide information about traffic patterns, and thus enable the study of urban flow -- what will traffic between two locations look like at a certain date and time in the future? Existing big data methods try to outdo each other in terms of complexity and algorithmic sophistication. In the spirit of "big data beats algorithms", we present a very simple baseline which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including Bing Maps and Baidu Maps (whose APIs permit large scale experimentation). Such a travel time estimation baseline has several important uses, such as navigation (fast travel time estimates can serve as approximate heuristics for A search variants for path finding) and trip planning (which uses operating hours for popular destinations along with travel time estimates to create an itinerary).Comment: 12 page

Knowledge Discovery through Mobility Data Integration

In the era of Big Data a huge amount of information are available from every sin- gle citizen of our hyper-connected world. A simple smartphone can collect data with different kinds of information: a big part of these are related to mobility. A smartphone is connected to networks, such as GSM, GPS, Internet (and then social networks): each of them can provide us information about where, how and why the user is moving across space and time. Data integration has a key role in this understanding process: the combination of different data sources increases the value of the extracted knowledge, even though such integration task is often not trivial. This thesis aim to represent a step toward a reliable Mobility Analysis framework, capable to exploit the richness of the spatio-temporal data nowadays available. The work done is an exploration of meaningful open challenges, from an efficient Map Matching of low sampling GPS data to Inferring Human Activities from GPS tracks. A further experimentation has been performed over GSM and Twitter data, in order to detect and recognize significant events in terms of people presence and related tweets. Another promising perspective is the use of such extracted knowledge to enrich actual geospatial Datasets with a ’Wisdom of the crowd’ dimension to derive, for instance, routing policies over road networks: most chosen paths among usual drivers are more meaningful than simple shortest paths