Two Weeks Stay at the MIT

As part of my Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project, I am currently visiting the SENSEable City Lab to work on innovative approaches to describe tourist dynamics in cities. Instead of relying on the deployment of ad hoc infrastructure, the solutions will favor the collection and analysis of both explicitly and implicitly disclosed people-generated geolocated information. In parallel, we will work on scenarios of location and time sensitive information delivery to enhance the tourist experience. I hope to set the emphasis for later implementation on the socio-technical implications for the design and deployment these types of applications.

Analysis of the tourist dynamics
I observe Flickr as a contemporary open platform where location and time sensitive data can be uploaded and accessed (mainly from an historical, archiving, awareness, sociality functions). The platform offers news approaches to collect data revealing patterns of tourists and their usage of a city (points of interests) and a region (flow between urban and natural attractions). In details, it means:

• Reveal temporal signatures: activity by day-of-week, weekdays and weekends, seasons, periods.
• Characterize people: Difference in the traces left by locals and visitors
• Characterize the types of visits: where a tourist converging over the course of their visit (how many days, how far, how dense (i.e. amount of different visits per day)
• Visualize the flow with origin and destination (city, region and world level)
• Characterize the areas of the city/region: where are the concentration of tourists? Cluster analysis to define or characterize zones (define a composite signature).
• Define points of interests: which landmarks attract more people

Enhancement of tourist experience
The study of the use of the granularity feature ) can help defining the level of location information quality and timeliness to be delivered in the design of useful and relevant urban location-aware applications. Moreover, it can help framing approaches the access and delivery of information to tourists owning mobile (cellphone) and nomadic (notebooks) devices. How to perform a field study to evaluate if the tools to enhance a tourist experience allow making more informed decisions. This might not be covered in the scope of these 2 weeks, but it surely would be good to define some next steps.

Expected outcome

• An extended abstract to be submitted as late-breaking results for UbiComp07. As part of the study I perform here. I use the context and tools of the analyis of the tourist dynamics to study how people upload and explicitly disclose geolocated information and how they retrieve/access it. My hypothesis is that the level of location information quality and timeliness to be delivered can help a designer to provide useful and relevant urban location-aware applications.
• Report on the results of the proof of concept of the using Flickr as source for tourist dynamic analysis. I should focus on the results, the limitations and the possible other approaches and convergence of data.
• Scenarios on the delivery of location sensitive information to tourists

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the context of my flickr case study and more importantly my last city-scale field experiment.