UrbanFM: Inferring Fine-Grained Urban Flows

Urban flow monitoring systems play important roles in smart city efforts around the world. However, the ubiquitous deployment of monitoring devices, such as CCTVs, induces a long-lasting and enormous cost for maintenance and operation. This suggests the need for a technology that can reduce the number of deployed devices, while preventing the degeneration of data accuracy and granularity. In this paper, we aim to infer the real-time and fine-grained crowd flows throughout a city based on coarse-grained observations. This task is challenging due to two reasons: the spatial correlations between coarse- and fine-grained urban flows, and the complexities of external impacts. To tackle these issues, we develop a method entitled UrbanFM based on deep neural networks. Our model consists of two major parts: 1) an inference network to generate fine-grained flow distributions from coarse-grained inputs by using a feature extraction module and a novel distributional upsampling module; 2) a general fusion subnet to further boost the performance by considering the influences of different external factors. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, namely TaxiBJ and HappyValley, validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to seven baselines, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance of our approach on the fine-grained urban flow inference problem

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN