Smart-phone based spatio-temporal sensing for annotated transit map generation

City transit maps are one of the important resources for public navigation in today's digital world. However, the availability of transit maps for many developing countries is very limited, primarily due to the various socio-economic factors that drive the private operated and partially regulated transport services. Public transports at these cities are marred with many factors such as uncoordinated waiting time at bus stoppages, crowding in the bus, sporadic road conditions etc., which also need to be annotated so that commuters can take informed decision. Interestingly, many of these factors are spatio-temporal in nature. In this paper, we develop CityMap, a system to automatically extract transit routes along with their eccentricities from spatio-temporal crowdsensed data collected via commuters' smart-phones. We apply a learning based methodology coupled with a feature selection mechanism to filter out the necessary information from raw smart-phone sensor data with minimal user engagement and drain of batt

Inferring accurate bus trajectories from noisy estimated arrival time records

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

ComfRide: A smartphone based system for comfortable public transport recommendation

Passenger comfort is a major factor influencing a commuter's decision to avail public transport. Existing studies suggest that factors like overcrowding, jerkiness, traffic congestion etc. correlate well to passenger's (dis)comfort. An online survey conducted with more than 300 participants from 12 different countries reveals that different personalized and context dependent factors influence passenger comfort during a travel by public transport. Leveraging on these findings, we identify correlations between comfort level and these dynamic parameters, and implement a smartphone based application, ComfRide, which recommends t

Advances in crowd analysis for urban applications through urban event detection

The recent expansion of pervasive computing technology has contributed with novel means to pursue human activities in urban space. The urban dynamics unveiled by these means generate an enormous amount of data. These data are mainly endowed by portable and radio-frequency devices, transportation systems, video surveillance, satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, and social networking services. This has opened a new avenue of opportunities, to understand and predict urban dynamics in detail, and plan various real-time services and applications in response to that. Over the last decade, certain aspects of the crowd, e.g., mobility, sentimental, size estimation and behavioral, have been analyzed in detail and the outcomes have been reported. This paper mainly conducted an extensive survey on various data sources used for different urban applications, the state-of-the-art on urban data generation techniques and associated processing methods in order to demonstrate their merits and capabilities. Then, available open-access crowd data sets for urban event detection are provided along with relevant application programming interfaces. In addition, an outlook on a support system for urban application is provided which fuses data from all the available pervasive technology sources and finally, some open challenges and promising research directions are outlined

Spatial and Temporal Sentiment Analysis of Twitter data

The public have used Twitter world wide for expressing opinions. This study focuses on spatio-temporal variation of georeferenced Tweets’ sentiment polarity, with a view to understanding how opinions evolve on Twitter over space and time and across communities of users. More specifically, the question this study tested is whether sentiment polarity on Twitter exhibits specific time-location patterns. The aim of the study is to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of georeferenced Twitter sentiment polarity within the area of 1 km buffer around the Curtin Bentley campus boundary in Perth, Western Australia. Tweets posted in campus were assigned into six spatial zones and four time zones. A sentiment analysis was then conducted for each zone using the sentiment analyser tool in the Starlight Visual Information System software. The Feature Manipulation Engine was employed to convert non-spatial files into spatial and temporal feature class. The spatial and temporal distribution of Twitter sentiment polarity patterns over space and time was mapped using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Some interesting results were identified. For example, the highest percentage of positive Tweets occurred in the social science area, while science and engineering and dormitory areas had the highest percentage of negative postings. The number of negative Tweets increases in the library and science and engineering areas as the end of the semester approaches, reaching a peak around an exam period, while the percentage of negative Tweets drops at the end of the semester in the entertainment and sport and dormitory area. This study will provide some insights into understanding students and staff ’s sentiment variation on Twitter, which could be useful for university teaching and learning management

Análisis urbano y comunidades inteligentes: “una aproximación al empleo de la tecnología en la movilidad cotidiana”

Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies in order to organize different processes in cities and improve the quality of life are required. The creation of smart communities is shown as a sustainable solution since they deal with various key aspects, such as traffc management and mobility, through the use of information technologies (ITs). This work presents a review of recent studies using information technologies for urban analysis and mobility in cities. A descriptive analysis of automated methods for collecting and analyzing citizens’ mobility patterns is performed; it is centered in smart card use, geolocation and geotagging. It is concluded that a robust communication infrastructure, supported by an effcient computational platform allowing big data management and ubiquitous computing, is a crucial aspect for urban management in a smart community.La concentración de la población en los centros urbanos es una problemática mundial que requiere de estrategias que permitan organizar sus procesos y mejorar la calidad de vida. La creación de comunidades inteligentes se muestra como una solución sostenible, debido a que éstas trabajan aspectos claves para el desarrollo urbano, como la gestión de tráfco y la movilidad, apoyada en las tecnologías de la información (TICs). Este trabajo presenta una revisión del estado del arte en cuanto a la aplicación de las TICs al análisis urbano y movilidad ciudadana. Se analizan descriptivamente diversos métodos automáticos para la recolección y el análisis del patrón de movilidad de los ciudadanos, enfocándose en el uso de tarjetas inteligentes, geolocalización y geoetiquetado. Se encuentra que una infraestructura de comunicaciones robusta, apoyada en una plataforma computacional ágil con manejo de grandes datos y computación ubicua, es primordial para la gestión urbana en una comunidad inteligente

Análisis Urbano y Comunidades Inteligentes: Una Aproximación al Empleo de la Tecnología en la Movilidad Cotidiana

Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies in order to organize different processes in cities and improve the quality of life are required. The creation of smart communities is shown as a sustainable solution since they deal with various key aspects, such as traffic management and mobility, through the use of information technologies (ITs). This work presents a review of recent studies using information technologies for urban analysis and mobility in cities. A descriptive analysis of automated methods for collecting and analyzing citizens’ mobility patterns is performed; it is centered in smart card use, geolocation and geotagging. It is concluded that a robust communication infrastructure, supported by an efficient computational platform allowing big data management and ubiquitous computing, is a crucial aspect for urban management in a smart communityLa concentración de la población en los centros urbanos es una problemática mundial que requiere de estrategias que permitan organizar sus procesos y mejorar la calidad de vida. La creación de comunidades inteligentes se muestra como una solución sostenible, debido a que éstas trabajan aspectos claves para el desarrollo urbano, como la gestión de tráfico y la movilidad, apoyada en las tecnologías de la información (TICs). Este trabajo presenta una revisión del estado del arte en cuanto a la aplicación de las TICs al análisis urbano y movilidad ciudadana. Se analizan descriptivamente diversos métodos automáticos para la recolección y el análisis del patrón de movilidad de los ciudadanos, enfocándose en el uso de tarjetas inteligentes, geolocalización y geoetiquetado. Se encuentra que una infraestructura de comunicaciones robusta, apoyada en una plataforma computacional ágil con manejo de grandes datos y computación ubicua, es primordial para la gestión urbana en una comunidad inteligente