Institute For The Future

Tracking Mobile Swarms to Change the Way We See Cities

Last fall, I reported on Alberto Barabasi's research using mobile phones to track large-scale human mobility patterns after seeing him give a paper on the topic in Budapest. That paper has now been published in Nature, and there is a public summary in Nature News.

 

Basically, by taking very large samples of cell phone users' locations, this team is able to create a mathematical fingerprint of mobility in contemporary cities. This ought to provide a useful metric to track if and how these patterns respond to changes in land use, income, and availability of communications infrastructure.

 

Back then I wrote:

 

 

This kind of analysis has many applications, but on of the most interesting he raised is using it during an epidemic to look at real-time flux of people across parts of a city. (one of Barabasi's appointments is at the Harvard Medical School) Using this data, you could develop a metric of how many people are flowing across every cell site boundary. I imagine you could also develop predictive models of this flow.

 

 

While a huge flap is building over the privacy ethics and human subjects review (or lack of both) surrounding this study, I think studies like these and similar work at MIT's senseABLE City Lab will be on the level of aerial photography in terms of how much they change the way we see, think about and plan cities.