A global-scale analysis of the sharing economy model – an AirBnB case study

Abstract: The sharing economy model has changed the way in which people engage in a variety of activities, including travelling, trading, working, and lending/borrowing money. Several studies exist that aim to understand, quantify and model such phenomenon, but most such studies are geographically focused on countries in the Western World. Knowledge about the penetration and adoption of this novel market model in non-Western countries is much more limited, and almost completely lacking when it comes to emerging markets, where it was touted to bring the biggest benefits and be a game changer to uplift people economically. To close the gap, we chose Airbnb as an example of sharing economy model with worldwide market penetration, and performed a large-scale quantitative study of its penetration and adoption in seven cities in Asia, five cities in Latin America. We compared findings against seven cities in the Western World, and observed patterns to be similar across all locales, with two notable exceptions: the geographic penetration of such services, and the experience that guests travelling to such destinations shared in their reviews

City form and well-being: what makes London neighborhoods good places to live?

What is the relationship between urban form and citizens’ well-being? In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to help answer this question, inspired by theories developed within the fields of architecture and population health. The method extracts a rich set of metrics of urban form and well-being from openly accessible datasets. Using linear regression analysis, we identify a model which can explain 30% of the variance of well-being when applied to Greater London, UK. Outcomes of this research can inform the discussion on how to design cities which foster the wellbeing of their residents

Exploring maintenance practices in crowd-mapping

Crowd-mapping is a form of collaborative work that empowers users to gather and share geographic knowledge. OpenStreetMap is one of the most successful examples of such paradigm, where the goal of building a global map of the world is collectively performed by over 2M contributors. Despite geographic information being intrinsically evolving, little research has so far gone into analysing maintenance practices in these domains. In this paper, we perform a preliminary exploration to quantitatively capture maintenance dynamics in geographic crowd-sourced datasets, in terms of: the extent to which different maintenance actions are taking place, the type of spatial information that is being maintained, and who engages in these practices. We apply this method to 117 countries in OSM, over one year of mapping activity. Our findings reveal that, although maintenance practices vary substantially from country to country in terms of how widespread they are, strong commonalities exist in terms of what metadata is being maintained and by whom

A scalable method to quantify the relationship between urban form and socio-economic indexes

The world is undergoing a process of fast and unprecedented urbanisation. It is reported that by 2050 66% of the entire world population will live in cities. Although this phenomenon is generally considered beneficial, it is also causing housing crises and more inequality worldwide. In the past, the relationship between design features of cities and socio-economic levels of their residents has been investigated using both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, both sets of works had significant limitations as the former lacked generalizability and replicability, while the latter had a too narrow focus, since they tended to analyse single aspects of the urban environment rather than a more complex set of metrics. This might have been caused by the lack of data availability. Nowadays, though, larger and freely accessible repositories of data can be used for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a scalable method that delves deeper into the relationship between features of cities and socio-economics. The method uses openly accessible datasets to extract multiple metrics of urban form and then models the relationship between urban form and socio-economic levels through spatial regression analysis. We applied this method to the six major conurbations (i.e., London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle) of the United Kingdom (UK) and found that urban form could explain up to 70% of the variance of the English official socio-economic index, the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). In particular, results suggest that more deprived UK neighbourhoods are characterised by higher population density, larger portions of unbuilt land, more dead-end roads, and a more regular street pattern

Social contribution settings and newcomer retention in humanitarian crowd mapping

Organisers of crowd mapping initiatives seek to identify practices that foster an active contributor community. Theory suggests that social contribution settings can provide important support functions for newcomers, yet to date there are no empirical studies of such an effect. We present the first study that evaluates the relationship between colocated practice and newcomer retention in a crowd mapping community, involving hundreds of first-time participants. We find that certain settings are associated with a significant increase in newcomer retention, as are regular meetings, and a greater mix of experiences among attendees. Factors relating to the setting such as food breaks and technical disruptions have comparatively little impact. We posit that successful social contribution settings serve as an attractor: they provide opportunities to meet enthusiastic contributors, and can capture prospective contributors who have a latent interest in the practice

Workshop on evaluating personal search

The first ECIR workshop on Evaluating Personal Search was held on 18th April 2011 in Dublin, Ireland. The workshop consisted of 6 oral paper presentations and several discussion sessions. This report presents an overview of the scope and contents of the workshop and outlines the major outcomes

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Detection in Keratotic Variants of Oral Lichen Planus: Negative Results in a Preliminary Open Study

Background During the last few decades, several researches have been identified HPV genomic sequences in Head Neck Squamous Cell Carcinomas (HNSCC) and in Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders (OPMD) hypothesizing a possible viral etiological role. However, the reported prevalence of HPV-DNA (varying from 0% to 100%) in these lesions result still very discordant. Objective Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in Oral Lichen Planus (OLP) has been largely investigated but not so extensively with respect to its morphological/histopathological features. The possible influence of hyper-keratosis/parakeratosis in HPV detection for keratotic variants of OLP is here proposed and investigated. Materials and methods A total of 45 individuals with keratotic variants of OLP, clinically and histologically confirmed, were consecutively enrolled, before starting any treatment, and underwent oral brushing for HPV investigation. Viral DNA was extracted from oral brushed cells and HPV DNA researched by the combined use of the INNO-LiPA HPV Genotyping system (Innogenetics) and a PCR assay coupled with genome sequencing. Results None of cytological samples collected resulted HPV-positive. Conclusions In this preliminary study, oral HPV infection, investigated by means of a non-invasive oral sampling procedure and a standardized approach for HPV DNA detection, was not showed in any of the investigated cases. The presence of epithelial hyper-keratosis/parakeratosis in some variants of OLP could be a possible cause of impenetrability and/or difficult detection of the virus. Indeed, in case of keratotic variants of OLP, the possible potential false-negative results of HPV investigation by cytological procedure might be possible; on consequence, an alternative approach for viral detection (i.e. by histological sampling) should be considered