A review of urban computing for mobile phone traces

In this work, we present three classes of methods to extract information from triangulated mobile phone signals, and describe applications with different goals in spatiotemporal analysis and urban modeling. Our first challenge is to relate extracted information from phone records (i.e., a set of time-stamped coordinates estimated from signal strengths) with destinations by each of the million anonymous users. By demonstrating a method that converts phone signals into small grid cell destinations, we present a framework that bridges triangulated mobile phone data with previously established findings obtained from data at more coarse-grained resolutions (such as at the cell tower or census tract levels). In particular, this method allows us to relate daily mobility networks, called motifs here, with trip chains extracted from travel diary surveys. Compared with existing travel demand models mainly relying on expensive and less-frequent travel survey data, this method represents an advantage for applying ubiquitous mobile phone data to urban and transportation modeling applications. Second, we present a method that takes advantage of the high spatial resolution of the triangulated phone data to infer trip purposes by examining semantic-enriched land uses surrounding destinations in individual's motifs. In the final section, we discuss a portable computational architecture that allows us to manage and analyze mobile phone data in geospatial databases, and to map mobile phone trips onto spatial networks such that further analysis about flows and network performances can be done. The combination of these three methods demonstrate the state-of-the-art algorithms that can be adapted to triangulated mobile phone data for the context of urban computing and modeling applications.BMW GroupAustrian Institute of TechnologySingapore. National Research FoundationMassachusetts Institute of Technology. School of EngineeringMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and PlanningSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (Center for Future Mobility

Multimodal urban mobility and multilayer transport networks

Transportation networks, from bicycle paths to buses and railways, are the backbone of urban mobility. In large metropolitan areas, the integration of different transport modes has become crucial to guarantee the fast and sustainable flow of people. Using a network science approach, multimodal transport systems can be described as multilayer networks, where the networks associated to different transport modes are not considered in isolation, but as a set of interconnected layers. Despite the importance of multimodality in modern cities, a unified view of the topic is currently missing. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging research areas of multilayer transport networks and multimodal urban mobility, focusing on contributions from the interdisciplinary fields of complex systems, urban data science, and science of cities. First, we present an introduction to the mathematical framework of multilayer networks. We apply it to survey models of multimodal infrastructures, as well as measures used for quantifying multimodality, and related empirical findings. We review modelling approaches and observational evidence in multimodal mobility and public transport system dynamics, focusing on integrated real-world mobility patterns, where individuals navigate urban systems using different transport modes. We then provide a survey of freely available datasets on multimodal infrastructure and mobility, and a list of open source tools for their analyses. Finally, we conclude with an outlook on open research questions and promising directions for future research.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figure

The Shortest Path to Happiness: Recommending Beautiful, Quiet, and Happy Routes in the City

When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant. To quantify the extent to which urban locations are pleasant, we use data from a crowd-sourcing platform that shows two street scenes in London (out of hundreds), and a user votes on which one looks more beautiful, quiet, and happy. We consider votes from more than 3.3K individuals and translate them into quantitative measures of location perceptions. We arrange those locations into a graph upon which we learn pleasant routes. Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy. To test the generality of our approach, we consider Flickr metadata of more than 3.7M pictures in London and 1.3M in Boston, compute proxies for the crowdsourced beauty dimension (the one for which we have collected the most votes), and evaluate those proxies with 30 participants in London and 54 in Boston. These participants have not only rated our recommendations but have also carefully motivated their choices, providing insights for future work.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201

Advances in Public Transport Platform for the Development of Sustainability Cities

Modern societies demand high and varied mobility, which in turn requires a complex transport system adapted to social needs that guarantees the movement of people and goods in an economically efficient and safe way, but all are subject to a new environmental rationality and the new logic of the paradigm of sustainability. From this perspective, an efficient and flexible transport system that provides intelligent and sustainable mobility patterns is essential to our economy and our quality of life. The current transport system poses growing and significant challenges for the environment, human health, and sustainability, while current mobility schemes have focused much more on the private vehicle that has conditioned both the lifestyles of citizens and cities, as well as urban and territorial sustainability. Transport has a very considerable weight in the framework of sustainable development due to environmental pressures, associated social and economic effects, and interrelations with other sectors. The continuous growth that this sector has experienced over the last few years and its foreseeable increase, even considering the change in trends due to the current situation of generalized crisis, make the challenge of sustainable transport a strategic priority at local, national, European, and global levels. This Special Issue will pay attention to all those research approaches focused on the relationship between evolution in the area of transport with a high incidence in the environment from the perspective of efficiency

How machine learning informs ride-hailing services: A survey

In recent years, online ride-hailing services have emerged as an important component of urban transportation system, which not only provide significant ease for residents’ travel activities, but also shape new travel behavior and diversify urban mobility patterns. This study provides a thorough review of machine-learning-based methodologies for on-demand ride-hailing services. The importance of on-demand ride-hailing services in the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban traffic is first highlighted, with machine-learning-based macro-level ride-hailing research demonstrating its value in guiding the design, planning, operation, and control of urban intelligent transportation systems. Then, the research on travel behavior from the perspective of individual mobility patterns, including carpooling behavior and modal choice behavior, is summarized. In addition, existing studies on order matching and vehicle dispatching strategies, which are among the most important components of on-line ride-hailing systems, are collected and summarized. Finally, some of the critical challenges and opportunities in ride-hailing services are discussed

엣지 클라우드 환경을 위한 연산 오프로딩 시스템

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 전기·정보공학부,2020. 2. 문수묵.The purpose of my dissertation is to build lightweight edge computing systems which provide seamless offloading services even when users move across multiple edge servers. I focused on two specific application domains: 1) web applications and 2) DNN applications. I propose an edge computing system which offload computations from web-supported devices to edge servers. The proposed system exploits the portability of web apps, i.e., distributed as source code and runnable without installation, when migrating the execution state of web apps. This significantly reduces the complexity of state migration, allowing a web app to migrate within a few seconds. Also, the proposed system supports offloading of webassembly, a standard low-level instruction format for web apps, having achieved up to 8.4x speedup compared to offloading of pure JavaScript codes. I also propose incremental offloading of neural network (IONN), which simultaneously offloads DNN execution while deploying a DNN model, thus reducing the overhead of DNN model deployment. Also, I extended IONN to support large-scale edge server environments by proactively migrating DNN layers to edge servers where mobile users are predicted to visit. Simulation with open-source mobility dataset showed that the proposed system could significantly reduce the overhead of deploying a DNN model.본 논문의 목적은 사용자가 이동하는 동안에도 원활한 연산 오프로딩 서비스를 제공하는 경량 엣지 컴퓨팅 시스템을 구축하는 것입니다. 웹 어플리케이션과 인공신경망 (DNN: Deep Neural Network) 이라는 두 가지 어플리케이션 도메인에서 연구를 진행했습니다. 첫째, 웹 지원 장치에서 엣지 서버로 연산을 오프로드하는 엣지 컴퓨팅 시스템을 제안합니다. 제안된 시스템은 웹 앱의 실행 상태를 마이그레이션 할 때 웹 앱의 높은 이식성(소스 코드로 배포되고 설치하지 않고 실행할 수 있음)을 활용합니다. 이를 통해 상태 마이그레이션의 복잡성이 크게 줄여서 웹 앱이 몇 초 내에 마이그레이션 될 수 있습니다. 또한, 제안된 시스템은 웹 어플리케이션을 위한 표준 저수준 인스트럭션인 웹 어셈블리 오프로드를 지원하여 순수한 JavaScript 코드 오프로드와 비교하여 최대 8.4 배의 속도 향상을 달성했습니다. 둘째, DNN 어플리케이션을 엣지 서버에 배포할 때, DNN 모델을 전송하는 동안 DNN 연산을 오프로드 하여 빠르게 성능향상을 달성할 수 있는 점진적 오프로드 방식을 제안합니다. 또한, 모바일 사용자가 방문 할 것으로 예상되는 엣지 서버로 DNN 레이어를 사전에 마이그레이션하여 콜드 스타트 성능을 향상시키는 방식을 제안 합니다. 오픈 소스 모빌리티 데이터셋을 이용한 시뮬레이션에서, DNN 모델을 배포하면서 발생하는 성능 저하를 제안 하는 방식이 크게 줄일 수 있음을 확인하였습니다.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Offloading Web App Computations to Edge Servers 1 1.2 Offloading DNN Computations to Edge Servers 3 Chapter 2. Seamless Offloading of Web App Computations 7 2.1 Motivation: Computation-Intensive Web Apps 7 2.2 Mobile Web Worker System 10 2.2.1 Review of HTML5 Web Worker 10 2.2.2 Mobile Web Worker System 11 2.3 Migrating Web Worker 14 2.3.1 Runtime State of Web Worker 15 2.3.2 Snapshot of Mobile Web Worker 16 2.3.3 End-to-End Migration Process 21 2.4 Evaluation 22 2.4.1 Experimental Environment 22 2.4.2 Migration Performance 24 2.4.3 Application Execution Performance 27 Chapter 3. IONN: Incremental Offloading of Neural Network Computations 30 3.1 Motivation: Overhead of Deploying DNN Model 30 3.2 Background 32 3.2.1 Deep Neural Network 33 3.2.2 Offloading of DNN Computations 33 3.3 IONN For DNN Edge Computing 35 3.4 DNN Partitioning 37 3.4.1 Neural Network (NN) Execution Graph 38 3.4.2 Partitioning Algorithm 40 3.4.3 Handling DNNs with Multiple Paths. 43 3.5 Evaluation 45 3.5.1 Experimental Environment 45 3.5.2 DNN Query Performance 46 3.5.3 Accuracy of Prediction Functions 48 3.5.4 Energy Consumption. 49 Chapter 4. PerDNN: Offloading DNN Computations to Pervasive Edge Servers 51 4.1 Motivation: Cold Start Issue 51 4.2 Proposed Offloading System: PerDNN 52 4.2.1 Edge Server Environment 53 4.2.2 Overall Architecture 54 4.2.3 GPU-aware DNN Partitioning 56 4.2.4 Mobility Prediction 59 4.3 Evaluation 63 4.3.1 Performance Gain of Single Client 64 4.3.2 Large-Scale Simulation 65 Chapter 5. RelatedWorks 73 Chapter 6. Conclusion. 78 Chapter 5. RelatedWorks 73 Chapter 6. Conclusion 78 Bibliography 80Docto