http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/cellphones.html
MIT researchers map city by cellphone
Denise Brehm, News Office
September 14, 2005
Can you see me now?
Researchers at MIT may not be able to hear your cellphone call, but
they have found a way to see it. They mapped a city in real time by
tracking tens of thousands of people traveling about carrying
cellphones.
Using anonymous cellphone data provided by the leading cellphone
operator in Austria, A1/Mobilkom, the researchers developed the
Mobile Landscapes project, creating electronic maps of cellphone use
in the metropolitan area of Graz, Austria, the country's second-
largest city.
The researchers used three types of data -- density of cellphone
calls, origins and destinations of the calls, and position of users
tracked at regular intervals -- to create computer-generated images
that can be overlayed with one another and with geographic and street
maps of a city to show the peaks and valleys of the landscape as well
as peaks in cellphone use.
"For the first time ever we are able to visualize the full dynamics
of a city in real time," said project leader Carlo Ratti, an
architect/engineer and head of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This opens up new
possibilities for urban studies and planning. The real-time city is
now real: a system that is able to continuously sense its condition
and can quickly react to its criticalities," he added.
In recent years, techniques to locate and track mobile devices have
become increasingly available; such techniques were crucial to law
enforcement officials in their investigation of the Madrid and London
terrorist bombings. MIT's Mobile Landscapes project takes advantage
of these techniques at an unprecedented scale by mapping an entire
urban region continually at regular intervals.
The continuously changing electronic maps, which have a surprising
aesthetic appeal, will be displayed at the M-City Exhibition at the
Kunsthaus Graz from Oct. 1 to Jan. 8. Visitors to the show will be
invited to participate in the electronic tracking by sending text
messages to a server. "This participatory act aims to engage them in
the issues of social networks and distributed interaction, but also
on the possible drawbacks of limited privacy and geographical
surveillance," Ratti said.
The research could also have implications for use in large-scale
emergencies and for transportation engineers seeking ways to better
manage freeway traffic.
In addition to Ratti, designers on the project include MIT graduate
students Daniel Berry, Sonya Huang, Xiongjiu Liao, Andrea Mattiello,
Eugenio Morello and Andres Sevtsuk, and sophomore Daniel Gutierrez,
senior David Lee and junior Jia Lou. The exhibition is funded by A1/
Mobilkom, which provided data and technical assistance to MIT's
SENSEable City Laboratory.
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