The Website That Visualizes Human Activity in Cities Across the World
September 9th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
Phone data is set to become a standard resource that almost anyone can use to study and watch humanity continuously, much as they can now watch the weather unfold anywhere on the planet almost in real time.
But one thing is holding them back—the lack of powerful computational tools that can gather, crunch, and present the data in meaningful ways.
Today, that looks set to change to the work of Dániel Kondor and a few pals at the SENSEable City Laboratory, part of MIT, and at Ericsson, a company that produces network infrastructure technologies. These guys have unveiled a powerful online tool that uses mobile phone data to visualize human activity in cities all over the world.
This new tool, called ManyCities, allows anybody to study human activity in various cities with unprecedented detail. But the key is that it organizes and presents the data in intuitive ways that quickly reveals trends and special events.
Kondor and co show off their new toy by gathering mobile phone data from base stations across the cities of Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. The data includes the number of calls placed, the number of text messages sent, the amount of data downloaded and uploaded and the number of data requests at 15-minute intervals.
“The aggregated data does not include any sensitive customer information, but provides enough detail about the typical usage patterns on the scale of small neighborhoods,” say Kondor and co.
