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International Conference on Business Information Systems

BIS 2015: Business Information Systems Workshops pp 3–14Cite as

Listening to and Visualising the Pulse of Our Cities Using Social Media and Call Data Records

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 228))

Abstract

Methods and technologies exist to capture a sharp digital reflection of a city and to track its evolution with a decreasing delay, but decision makers will not benefit from our ability to feel the pulse of a city unless we provide them with tools to visually perceive emerging patterns and observe their dynamics. This keynote reports on a two year long experience in feeling the pulse of Milan with CitySensing. This system–developed by Politecnico di Milano and Telecom Italia–allows fusing and visually making sense of social media streams and privacy-preserving aggregates of Call Data Records. The effectiveness of CitySensing was demonstrated during Milan Design Week 2013 and 2014 by realising a visual analytics dashboard for event managers and a public storytelling installation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://jol.telecomitalia.com/jolskil/.

  2. 2.

    http://jol.telecomitalia.com/jolskil/citysensing/ and http://citysensing.fuorisalone.it/.

  3. 3.

    The Milan Design Week is a city-scale event held yearly in Milan. It features around 1,200 events in more than 500 places spread across the city and it attracts about half a million people from all over the world.

  4. 4.

    The vocabulary actually contains more terms, e.g., Grid and Cell, but in this short description we preferred a simplified description where the term Pixel is often used instead of Cell. We invite interested readers to check out [2] for more details.

  5. 5.

    4 frames per hour X 24 h X 2 (working and weed-end days) X 10.000 pixels.

  6. 6.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/.

  7. 7.

    Interested readers are invited to see the YouTube video http://youtu.be/MOBie09NHxM and to visit the page http://citysensing.fuorisalone.it.

  8. 8.

    Nowadays, this term is often used in the design of App interfaces, but the term roots back to user interface design in the late ’90s [12]. In this research, we adapt the methodology proposed in [12] to visual data analytics.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by the SKIL Lab of Telecom Italia, the EIT Digital project City Data Fusion for Event Management (13119, 14189) and the IBM Faculty Award 2013 granted to prof. E. Della Valle. We also would like to thank Matteo Azzi, Fabrizio Antonelli, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Christian Marazzi, and Roberto Larcher who worked at the CitySensing project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEIB-Politecnico of Milano, Milano, Italy

    Emanuele Della Valle & Marco Balduini

Authors
  1. Emanuele Della Valle
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  2. Marco Balduini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emanuele Della Valle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poznań, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

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Valle, E.D., Balduini, M. (2015). Listening to and Visualising the Pulse of Our Cities Using Social Media and Call Data Records. In: Abramowicz, W. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26762-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26762-3_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26761-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26762-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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