o    Overview

o    Schedule

o    Invited Speaker

o    Papers

o    Organizers

o    Sponsor

The 2nd International Workshop on Urban Computing

(UrbComp 2013)

Overview

Urbanization’s rapid progress has led to many big cities, which have modernized people’s lives but also engendered big challenges, such as air pollution, increased energy consumption and traffic congestion. Tackling these challenges can seem nearly impossible years ago given the complex and dynamic settings of cities. Nowadays, sensing technologies and large-scale computing infrastructures have produced a variety of big data in urban spaces, e.g. human mobility, air quality, traffic patterns, and geographical data. The big data implies rich knowledge about a city and can help tackle these challenges when used correctly.

Urban computing is a process of acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human, to tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g. air pollution, increased energy consumption and traffic congestion. Urban computing connects unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management and analytics models, and novel visualization methods, to create win-win-win solutions that improve urban environment, human life quality, and city operation systems. Urban computing also helps us understand the nature of urban phenomena and even predict the future of cities.

Some representative projects and literatures can be found from this website.

Schedule Return to Top

Workshop Schedule at a Glance

August 11, 2013 Sunday

08:00-9:05

Opening ceremony

Keynote Speech: Computational Urban Sciences: Emerging Opportunities
  Charlie Catlett, University of Chicago

9:05-10:00

Session 1: Human Mobility

10:00-10:30

Coffee break

10:30-12:00

Session 2: Social Behaviors and Urban Activities

12:00-13:40

Lunch

13:40-15:00

Session 3: Mining Urban Traffic

15:00-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:40

Session 4: Understanding Cities

16:40-17:10

Business meeting, Panel Discussion, and closing (30min)

Invited Speaker Return to Top

 Charlie Catlett, Professor at University of Chicago

Title: Computational Urban Sciences: Emerging Opportunities

Abstract:
Traditionally, urban data has been historical and course-grained, enabling only general questions of the form "what should have been done 10, 20, 50 years ago?" New data sources today can enable questions of the form "what should we do now," provided that appropriate computing and data analytics capabilities are applied. Data streams published by cities like Chicago are catalyzing an expanding community of entrepreneurs, academics, and companies developing new urban applications and services. Through internal data sharing partnerships between city governments academia, and industry, even more detailed and comprehensive questions can be asked, ultimately supporting a transition from purely reactive to proactive policy and planning. Charlie Catlett will provide an overview of interdisciplinary urban science projects and opportunities in Chicago that apply computational sciences to understanding cities..


Bio:
Charlie Catlett is a Senior Computer Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He is the founding director of the Computation Institute's Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD), an initiative to bring data analytics, computational modeling, and embedded systems tools to understanding and designing cities. He is also a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current focus areas include urban data science, cyber security, distributed computing and mobile/embedded computing. From 2007-2011, Catlett served as Argonne’s Chief Information Officer. Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985 and his early work there included participation on the team that deployed and managed the NSFNet. In the early 1990′s Catlett participated in the DARPA/NSF Gigabit Testbeds Initiative, coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Catlett was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (GGF, now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 through 2004. During this same period he designed and deployed one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use – I-WIRE, funded by the State of Illinois. He has been involved in Grid (distributed) computing since the early 1990s, when he co-authored (with Larry Smarr) a seminal paper “Metacomputing” in the Communications of the ACM, which outlined many of the high-level goals of what is today called Grid computing.
 

Table of Contents Return to Top

Full Papers

Exploring Human Movements in Singapore: A Comparative Analysis Based on Mobile Phone and Taxicab Usages 
Chaogui Kang (MIT), Stanislav Sobolevsky (MIT), Yu Liu (Peking University), Carlo Ratti (MIT)

Analyzing the Composition of Cities Using Spatial Clustering
zechun cao (University of Houston), Sujing Wang (University of Houton), Germain Forestier (University of Haute Alsace), Anne Puissant (University of Strasbourg), Christoph Eick (University of Houston)

A Review of Urban Computing for Mobile Phone Traces: Current Methods, Challenges and Opportunities 
Shan Jiang (MIT), Gaston Fiore (MIT), Yingxiang Yang (MIT), Joseph Ferreira (MIT), Emilio Frazzoli (MIT), Marta González (MIT)

Inferring human activities from GPS tracks 
Chiara Renso (ISTI-CNR), Barbara Furletti (KDDLAB- ISTI CNR), Paolo Cintia (KDDLAB- ISTI CNR), Laura Spinsanti (JCR Italy)

Fast and Exact Network Trajectory Similarity Computation: A Case-Study on Bicycle Corridor Planning  
Michael Evans (University of Minnesota), Dev Oliver (University of Minnesota), Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), Francis Harvey (University of Minnesota)

A comparison of Foursquare and Instagram to the study of city dynamics and urban social behavior 
Thiago Silva (Federal Univ. of Minas Gerais), Pedro Vaz de Melo (Federal Univ. of Minas Gerais), Jussara Almeida (Federal Univ. of Minas Gerais), Juliana Salles (Microsoft Research), Antonio Loureiro (UFMG)



Short Presentation Paper

Modeling Urban Traffic Dynamics in Coexistence with Urban Data Streams  
Vahid Moosavi (ETH Zurich), Ludger Hovestadt (ETH Zurich)

Understanding Urban Human Activity and Mobility Patterns Using Large-scale Location-based Data from Online Social Media
Samiul Hasan (Purdue University), Xianyuan Zhan (Purdue University), Satish Ukkusuri (Purdue University)

Finding Frequent Sub-trajectories with Time Constraints  
Xin Huang; Jun Luo (Shenzhen Institutes of Advance) Xin Wang

On the Importance of Temporal Dynamics in Modeling Urban Activity  
Ke Zhang (University of Pittsburgh), Qiuye Jin (University of Pittsburgh), Konstantinos Pelechrinis (University of Pittsburgh), Theodoros Lappas (University of Pittsburgh)

Daily travel behavior: Lessons from a week-long survey for the extraction of human mobility motifs related information
Christian Schneider(MIT, Humnet), Christian Rudloff (AIT), Dietmar Bauer (AIT), Marta Gonzalez (MIT)

From Data to Knowledge: City-wide Traffic Flows Analysis and Prediction Using Bing Maps  
Anna Izabel Tostes (UFMG), Fátima Duarte-Figueiredo (PUC Minas), Renato Assunção (UFMG), Juliana Salles (Microsoft Research), Antonio Loureiro (UFMG)

Exploring venue-based city-to-city similarity measures  
Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro (University of Sheffield), Justin Cranshaw (Carnegie Mellon University), Tae Yano (Carnegie Mellon University)

Prediction of User Location Using the Radiation Model and Social Check-Ins  
Alexey Tarasov (Dublin Institute of Technology), Felix Kling (National Centre for Geocomputation, Ireland)) Alexei Pozdnoukhov (National Centre for Geocomputation, Ireland)

Real-time Air Quality Monitoring Through Mobile Sensing in Metropolitan Areas  
Srinivas Devarakonda (Rutgers University), Parveen Sevusu (Rutgers University), HONGZHANG LIU (Rutgers University), Ruilin Liu (Rutgers University), Liviu Iftode (Rutgers University), Badri Nath (Rutgers University)

Spatiotemporal Periodical Pattern Mining in Traffic Data
Tanvi Jindal (UIUC), Prasanna Giridhar (UIUC), Lu-An Tang (UIUC), Jun Li (UIUC), Jiawei Han (UIUC)

Whose “City of Tomorrow” Is It? On Urban Computing, Utopianism, and Ethics  
Justin Cranshaw (Carnegie Mellon University)

Organizers Return to Top

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

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