Applications (where final users are citizens)
Survey of existing innovative applications and systems to provide added-value services to final users.
Contents
Citysense (Saltlux/Kono)
- Summary:
CitySense is a mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, "Where is everybody?" Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a free demonstration of the Macrosense platform. Using a billion points of GPS and ?WiFi positioning data from the last few years – plus real-time feeds – Citysense sees S.F. from above and puts the top live hotspots on mobile devices.
- How does it work?:
- Citysense is an application that operates on the Sense Networks Macrosense platform, which analyzes massive amounts of aggregate, anonymous location data in real-time. Macrosense is already being used by business people for things like selecting store locations and understanding retail demand.
- Application scenarios:
Live overall activity & top hotspots - First of all see if it's a good night to go out. The city is 21% busier than normal for right now? Let's go. But where to? Check out the top hotspots in real-time and head out.
- What's at hotspot #1? - Click over to Yelp or Google and find out what's going on at the #1 hotspot: Bars? Clubs? Restaurants? Then check out what's at #2. All with one-handed navigation: no typing needed.
- Show me where the unusually high activity is - Even if you're a local, Citysense can give you the live details you need. When the Mission or Soma is busier than normal – you'll know immediately.
- Future Plan:
- In its next release, Citysense will not only tell each person where everyone is right now, but where everyone like YOU is right now. The application will compare user’s history and preferences with those of other users, and show user where he or she are most likely to find people with similar tastes at that moment. So each person's nightlife map will look a little different, and will display a unique top hotspot list.
Sense Networks (Saltlux/Kono)
- Company Profile:
Sense Networks, Inc. indexes the real world using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries. The company's platform, Macrosense, receives streaming location data in real-time, analyzes and processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and stores it in a way that can be easily queried to better understand aggregate human activity. The company's first consumer application, Citysense, is for local nightlife discovery and social navigation. Sense Networks, headquartered in New York City's ?SoHo neighborhood, was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University.
- Technology:
- Analyzing locations in the real world requires an ability to process hundreds of thousands of data dimensions. Due to the temporal sensitivity of the number and type of people frequenting a place (which can be far more dynamic than a static web page on the internet), the raw data describing places in the real world requires a staggering number of dimensions. Sense Networks attributes 487,500 dimensions to every place in a city, thus identifying a unique and complex "DNA" which describes it completely. The dimensions are based on the movement of people in and out of that place over time, and the places those people visit before and afterwards. Proprietary MVE (Minimum Volume Embedding) algorithms reduce the dimensionality of location and temporal data to 2 dimensions while retaining over 90% of the information. This allows for visualizations of data that allow humans to better understand key dimensions and data relationships. This also allows the Macrosense platform to extract key relationships in the flow of people in a city, such as the flow of those shopping, commuting to and from work, or socializing. Additionally, Sense Networks applies advanced statistical algorithms to normalize activity based on years of historical data combined with demographic, weather, and other variables. Once a broad understanding of the spatial behaviors in a city is available, companies and investors can leverage the continuously updating framework to better understand their own customers from sparse location data, discover trends in aggregate consumer behavior for correlation with financial indicators, and predict demand for services and places.
- The Minimum Volume Embedding Algorithm:
- Minimum Volume Embedding (referred to herein as MVE) is a state-of-the-art method for summarizing large, high-dimensional data compactly (Shaw and Jebara, 2007). Subsequently, processing complex datasets with MVE makes it easy to perform many interesting analytics operations. For instance, finding clusters, subgroups, correlations, and categories become much easier when data is low-dimensional – as do making predictions and forecasts. Since such operations are difficult to perform with high-dimensional data (the so-called "curse of dimensionality") MVE is a vital step in creating a data analytics platform. In addition, MVE makes data more compact, thereby permitting efficient data storage and data retrieval. Assume we have N high-dimensional items or objects. Each object may be a person, with their own behavioral data or movement trail. Alternatively, the object may be a place, with its historical traffic density distributed over the work-week. The input to MVE is N large complex objects of dimensionality D. The output of MVE is a set of N low-dimensional summaries of the objects, for instance of dimensionality d. In most applications, the desired dimension d is much smaller than the data's original dimensionality D. For instance, the inputs may have hundreds of thousands of dimensions while the output of MVE is a two- or three-dimensional summary of each object.
Journey Planner (Saltlux/Kono)
- Summary:
Any information held by Transport for London and its subsidiary companies is accessible by the public. Especially, Journey Planner on TfL(http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2) website utilizes maps, timetables, and route information for helping people find optimal route.
- mobile alerts and services - After setting up personalized route, SMS alerts and email warnings of Tube and DLR service delays will be delivered. All information including Journey Planner, Travel news, timetables, maps are accessible by website and mobile phone via WAP (mobile internet) and SMS.
- Planning Journey by text message - One can plan a journey by text message. Just text A to B to 60TFL* (that's 60835), where A and B can be postcodes, full station or full bus-stop names, in any combination
- Tube line service updates - One can check for the latest updates of any delays to your Tube service by texting TUBE [Tube line] to 60835*. For example text TUBE NORTHERN to 60835 to receive a text update on services on the Northern line.
- Find a taxi or Private Hire Operator - TfL has launched a new service to help get home. Just text HOME to 60835* and the telephone numbers of two nearest licensed minicab operators will be sent directly to the person’s mobile phone. The person will also be sent the Taxi One-Number details.
Helsinki Bus Map
- Website:
- This application shows the positions of buses in Helsinki in Google Maps and it is updated in real time
Air Traffic
- Website:
- Similar to Helsinki Bus Map, this service traces in real time movements of airplanes