Data-driven study of urban infrastructure to enable city-wide ubiquitous computing

Abstract

Engineering a city-wide ubiquitous computing system requires a comprehensive understanding of urban infrastructure including physical motorways, vehicular traffic, and human activities. Many world cities were built at different time periods and with different purposes that resulted in diversified structures and characteristics, which have to be carefully considered while designing ubiquitous computing facilities. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to study global urban infrastructure, with enabling city-wide ubiquitous computing as the aim, using a massive data-driven network of planet-scale online web-cameras and a location-based online social network service, Foursquare. Our approach examines six metropolitan regions' infrastructure that includes more than 800 locations, 25 million vehicular mobility records, 220k routes, and two million Foursquare check-ins. We evaluate the spatio-temporal correlation in traffic patterns, examine the structure and connectivity in regions, and study the impact of human mobility on vehicular traffic to gain insight for enabling city-wide ubiquitous computing.