Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data

Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically, our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity. Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days, providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City during 2015

Co-experience Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor.

Experience and socialization are key factors in determining customer commitment and renewal decisions in the service sector. To analyse the combined effect of experience and socialization, in this paper we introduce the concept of co-experience networks. A new methodological approach, originally applied in the field of social ethology, is devised to study reality-mined co-experience networks. By analysing a network of health club members over four years, we find that long-experienced clients have a lower chance to renew their contracts. On the other hand, central members in the co-experience network are stable and tend to renew their memberships. Further, since the members of the same reference group align their levels of commitment, renewal decisions are clustered in a small-world network. These findings contribute to our understanding of social dynamics and localized conformity in customer decision-making that can be used to plan marketing strategies to improve customer retention.

Media fusion and future TV: Examining multi-screen TV convergence in Singapore

This study examines Singapore's national media blueprint and industry stakeholders' coping strategies in response to multi-screen TV development. The findings show Singapore muti-screen TV development is still at a nascent stage after launching Media Fushion and FutureTV plans in mid 2009. The policymakers play a key role to follow national media blueprint to unify the inter-industry and cross-country collaboration. TV operators and telcos are found to remediate themselves by harnessing the power of internet and mobile technologies for content innovation and distribution. To tackle the complicated convergent issues in multi-screen TV industry, this study proposes to separately regulate the technology-neutral platforms and diverse audiovisual content. It also recommends a pro-innovative policy with the light-touch licensing scheme and loose content regulation to facilitate the development of the next TV. --three-screen TV,multi-screen TV,convergence,media fusion,IPTV,mobile TV,cross-platform,TV technologies,TV market,TV policy

Does eContent talk to the heart?

The idea to add some value to already existing data was already addressed by the EC within the eContent framework: Content and services sometimes are built on top of existing data sets, and more than ten years ago the European Commission created the eContent framework to improve the added value reuse of public data sets. At that time, one of the challenges faced when submitting project proposals was to understand: which kind of data sets and how to reuse them—according to IPRs, according to privacy rules, etc.? The recently emerged keyword “open data” represents one of the nowadays’ challenges. Institutions and companies are investing time and resources in order to turn such a concept into reality. Open data refers to the idea that certain data should be freely available for use and re-use. When dealing with open data we must take into consideration, among others, two main aspects: the public body can legally dispose of the processed data using them freely and eventually re-firing them as it may consider useful? How it can be wise to behave in managing their rights? This is a real problem when dealing with public administrations especially in the field of cultural heritage, because there is a lot of material, such as books, pictures, maps and other potential content, but people don’t know exactly how to manage the rights and how to transfer certain rights to people using the material afterwards. There are some European Regulations in the EU concerning open data; guidelines in order to use such kind of data sets, basically 2 or 3 directives. Some of the EU Member States adopted the European directives at a local level, other countries were able to tune their already existing regulations in order to fit the European directives and other just continued with their already existing regulations. All public bodies are mainly concerned about data ownership, intellectual property and privacy. These issues are directly related to questions such as the origin of the data sets, i.e., the responsible of the project, data providers, harvesting procedure etc.; the procedure used to collect the data, the intellectual property ownership and transfer, i.e., who is the actual owner, which rights have been transferred, etc.; the protection of sensitive data and related citizens’ privacy issues; as well as statistic confidentiality, i.e., data anonymization. The release and re-use of public bodies’ datasets may impact citizens’ privacy. Personal information represent a wide range of data; they include any data concerning any identifiable individual and in some countries this applies even to companies if their data may involve individuals. .....

Does eContent talk to the heart?

ICT is stimulating changes in the way most people earn their incomes; altering the balance between our roles as consumer and producers; changing the way we educate succeeding generation and train ourselves; changing the fruition of world’s cultural heritage; transforming the delivery of health care; altering the way we govern ourselves; changing the way we form communities; altering the way we obtain and communicate information; contributing to bridge some cultural or physical gaps; and modifying pattern of activity among the elderly. In recent times the digital domain, once strictly populated by professional users and computer scientists, open up to former digitally divided. Technology is evolving toward a mature “calm” phase, “users” are overlapping more and more “citizens” and they consider technology and eServices as an everyday commodity, to buy a ticket, to meet a medical doctor, to access weather forecast even to initiate “social” relation. How such a new wave influenced cultural diversity and languages? Till what extent eContent and Services are available in local languages? Is the Internet a melting pot creating a new lingua franca the “Engternet”? After different waves jeopardising cultural diversity such as the different aspects of globalisation including global markets and infrastructures the Internet and related services are a potential silver bullet to kill diversities. This aspect takes us to carefully consider the importance to preserve “diversity”, especially in the digital age. Which is the real value of diversity? We all know that the world population today is bigger than the number of people that lived on the planet earth since the human race appeared, but incredibly today is easier to disseminate ideas and content through the planet reaching individuals. This is one of the effects of the global inter-communication in the digital era. Moreover global software tools are unleashing everyday creativity no regards about citizenship, language, gender or census. On one hand the digital age is enabling better opportunities to exploit local cultures and knowledge due to minorities, on the other hand such a “global village” jeopardizes minorities and local cultures playing the role of standardization agent. A kind of English language, the one generated by spelling and grammar checkers, and translators is still placed in pole position but very close we find Chinese language quickly improving its ranking. New devices and communication standards are inspiring new languages built on abbreviations, phonetic equivalences, graphic signs and emoticons, will the 140 chars tweet became the new structure of verses? Smart phones and tablets are breaking time and space barriers including formerly divided people in the emerging cultural phenomenon. This is true both for young generation but even for elderly people that find tablets and smart phones more user friendly than “old” computers. Digital technology is offering new ways to express creativity in different fields: music, images, videos, physical objects and more, enabling young generation to express their feeling and contribute to the creative industries. Content and services sometimes are built on top of existing data sets, more than ten years ago the European Commission created a framework to improve the added value reuse of public data sets. The recently emerged keyword “Open Data” represents one of the nowadays’ challenges. Institutions and companies are investing time and resources in order to turn such a concept into reality. Dealing with Open Data we must take into consideration, among the others, two main aspects: the public body can legally dispose of the processed data using them freely and eventually re-firing them as it may consider useful? How it can be wise to behave in managing their rights? These questions take us to directly refer to aspects ranging between the origin of the data set, the procedure activated in order to collect them at the time, the intellectual rights ownership and transfer, plus last but not less relevant the protection of sensitive data and related citizens’ privacy issues

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Dagstuhl News January - December 2007

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic