The Digital Life of Walkable Streets

Walkability has many health, environmental, and economic benefits. That is why web and mobile services have been offering ways of computing walkability scores of individual street segments. Those scores are generally computed from survey data and manual counting (of even trees). However, that is costly, owing to the high time, effort, and financial costs. To partly automate the computation of those scores, we explore the possibility of using the social media data of Flickr and Foursquare to automatically identify safe and walkable streets. We find that unsafe streets tend to be photographed during the day, while walkable streets are tagged with walkability-related keywords. These results open up practical opportunities (for, e.g., room booking services, urban route recommenders, and real-estate sites) and have theoretical implications for researchers who might resort to the use social media data to tackle previously unanswered questions in the area of walkability.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

Smelly Maps: The Digital Life of Urban Smellscapes

Smell has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, smell has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. One of the authors of this paper has ventured out in the urban world and conducted smellwalks in a variety of cities: participants were exposed to a range of different smellscapes and asked to record their experiences. As a result, smell-related words have been collected and classified, creating the first dictionary for urban smell. Here we explore the possibility of using social media data to reliably map the smells of entire cities. To this end, for both Barcelona and London, we collect geo-referenced picture tags from Flickr and Instagram, and geo-referenced tweets from Twitter. We match those tags and tweets with the words in the smell dictionary. We find that smell-related words are best classified in ten categories. We also find that specific categories (e.g., industry, transport, cleaning) correlate with governmental air quality indicators, adding validity to our study.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings of 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM2015

A hybrid property pricing model : the case of apartment residents in Jakarta Indonesia

Purpose: This research initiates a property pricing model that involves various perspectives and consumer considerations in selecting properties, including aspects of sales comparison, investment, hedonic life style, brand equity, and digital life style. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study investigates 222 residents of middle class apartments in Jabotadebek (Great Jakarta). The study employs Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to test the research hypotheses. Findings: The research found that the price of apartments in the region is strongly influenced by a combination of multi aspects of sales comparison, investment, hedonic life style, brand equity, and digital life style. Practical Implications: The research has implications for investment shows the weakest contribution to the apartment price. Originality/Value: This study found that the price of apartments in the region is strongly influenced by a combination of multi aspects of sales comparison, investment, hedonic life style, brand equity, and digital life style.peer-reviewe

How Turing parasites expand the computational landscape of digital life

Why are living systems complex? Why does the biosphere contain living beings with complexity features beyond those of the simplest replicators? What kind of evolutionary pressures result in more complex life forms? These are key questions that pervade the problem of how complexity arises in evolution. One particular way of tackling this is grounded in an algorithmic description of life: living organisms can be seen as systems that extract and process information from their surroundings in order to reduce uncertainty. Here we take this computational approach using a simple bit string model of coevolving agents and their parasites. While agents try to predict their worlds, parasites do the same with their hosts. The result of this process is that, in order to escape their parasites, the host agents expand their computational complexity despite the cost of maintaining it. This, in turn, is followed by increasingly complex parasitic counterparts. Such arms races display several qualitative phases, from monotonous to punctuated evolution or even ecological collapse. Our minimal model illustrates the relevance of parasites in providing an active mechanism for expanding living complexity beyond simple replicators, suggesting that parasitic agents are likely to be a major evolutionary driver for biological complexity.Comment: 13 pages, 8 main figures, 1 appendix with 5 extra figure

Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected Digital media files have the potential to persist across time in ways that analog files of the same types do not. This persistence follows from the relatively new potential to learn of the existence of such files and to physically locate copies, and it means that such files may follow us across the whole of our lives, appearing and reappearing at the most inopportune moments. They are indexed, stored, and accessible due to the architecture of the digital age. This chapter shows how this persistence can be pernicious across time, with the potential for normal youthful experimentation to have long-lasting effects when embedded into digital media. It acknowledges that the law does not address this problem, and proposes both a broadening of our acceptance of the youthful acts that may be embedded in digital media, as well as giving more legal control to those whose youths are so embedded

Introducing TU100 ‘My Digital Life’: Ubiquitous computing in a distance learning environment

In this paper we describe the Open University’s progress towards delivering an introduction to ubiquitous computing within a distance-learning environment. Our work is strongly influenced by the philosophy of learning-through-play and we have taken technologies originally designed for children’s education and adapted them for adult learners, many of whom will have no formal experience of computer science or information technology. We will introduce two novel technologies; Sense, a drag-and-drop programming language based on Scratch; and the SenseBoard, an inexpensive hardware device that can be connected to the student’s computer, through which they can sense their environment and display outputs. This paper is not intended as a detailed discussion of individual technologies (they will follow in time), rather it should serve as an introduction to the Open University’s method of teaching and how we hope to continue to recruit new computer scientists and engineers using novel technologies