Talk:Urban computing

Topic
This wiki article explained the terminology “urban computing” from: 1) where and how this term first introduced to the public 2) the difference between urban computing/technology/infrastructure and urban informatics; 3) offered several applications and examples from different domains - cultural archiving, energy consumption, health, social interaction, transportation and environment.

Also, this article provided 4 external links (Ubiquitous computing, Urban informatics, Smart city and Ingress) in order to help better understand urban computing.

I have to say the content within this article is indeed related to the topic, but under a poor content organization. For instance, the external links might be better explained how these links related to this article? NingZou (talk) 17:46, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Neutral point of view
This article read like an encyclopedia article. First, the field that urban computing is in and its relevant areas are introduced. Then, the author briefly presents the origin of urban computing and distinguishes the differences between urban computing and urban informatics by referencing Marcus Foth’s research study. All these are objectively illustrated. Next, the author introduces the concept of urban computing by using Yu Zheng’s study and provides the applications and examples, such as cultural archiving, Energy consumption, and transportation. All the statements use an indicative mood, not a persuasive essay. However, the only thing needs to be mentioned is that this article does not mention the negative elements about this topic. For instance, urban computing can help improve the quality of people’s life, but it also involves other issues, such as privacy issues and cost. Therefore, the negative sides should be included in this article.Sunnyxiao2017 (talk) 17:49, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Structure
In terms of the structure of this article, it includes much good content which covered many viewpoints, but still, it is quite incomplete in many areas.

First, it has a lead section that summarizes the topic, provides and prepare the readers with some general information to read the following sections. However, the lead section lacks to: provide a brief definition of what is urban computing; does not have a very good connection to the following “application and example” sections. In addition, the three paragraphs have redundant content especially the first and third paragraph, thus part of them need to be shortened.

Second, the “application and example” section starts with a brief definition of the urban computing, which I think should bring up in the lead section. The viewpoints in the second section covered many dimensions and each one is well represented, but the paragraph of “transportation” and “environment” has much richer information than other paragraphs especially provide the detailed information on the research examples. In addition, these two paragraphs are much more connected with the main topic with the first sentence arguing that they are the major application of the urban computing. However, other paragraphs do not have such tight connections to the main topic and they should also include the detailed research example information.

Third, the whole article missed some important element, especially on the side of the “computing”. There should have one section introduce what computational methods are available to use and how that application is used through computational method.Ang li (talk) 17:43, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Citation
Among internal references to other wikipedia articles, the page of “Elizabeth goodman” does not exist. Among external references that contain hyperlink, most of them are working fine. However, some links such as ref no. 10 (https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/signpost/cc.html) is outdated or moved. Also, about half the references do not have any hyperlinks.[12,13,16,17,19-23] Except the first paragraph of the subsection “environment” which lacks the appropriate citation, almost all of the statements and claims supported by one or more external references. Also, there are some technical terms like GPS, HVAC, loop sensors that a reader could be unfamiliar with. One improvement could be linking these terms to their corresponding wikipedia articles.

Sdjavadi (talk) 17:46, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Dimension not mentioned
These points are not mentioned in wikipedia article:
 * Goals: Solve issues(mentioned), Apply policies, Provide new opportunities

Maryam wiki69 (talk) 17:50, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Sensing and collecting data from different physical and virtual environment.
 * Preprocessing the collected data from heterogeneous resources to achieve a clean set of data, ready for analysis
 * Analysing the data, extracting knowledge, creating models using machine learning and data mining techniques and visualizing the results
 * Providing services and applying policies: (new opportunities/solve issues): Sense the environment and react (instantly and constantly) to the environment based on models and policies
 * Receiving feedbacks and improving the models
 * Privacy concerns
 * Applications include: Healthcare, Education, Banking, Agriculture & Farming, Transportation, Manufacturing, Residential, Retail (logistics)

Reliable Reference
“This involves the application of wireless networks, sensors, computational power, and data to improve the quality of densely populated areas.” - Not referenced. What quality is it improving? Quality of life? Quality of urban structures?

“Although closely tied to the field of urban informatics, Marcus Foth differentiates the two in his preface to Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics by saying that urban computing, urban technology, and urban infrastructure focus more on technological dimensions whereas urban informatics focuses on the social and human implications of technology in cities.[3]” - One-dimensional perspective

“In traditional sensor networks, devices are often purposefully built and specifically deployed for monitoring certain phenomenon[VA1] such as temperature, noise, and light[VA2] .[4]” The paper it is referencing does not say that they are purposefully built or specifically deployed.

“— Yu Zheng, Urban Computing with Big Data [6]“ Other authors are not mentioned. This is only one paper’s way of describing Urban Computing.

[10] is being updated and does not contain the information that “Energy consumption and pollution throughout the world is heavily impacted by urban transportation.”

[11] needs to have an updated link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2644828

[12] needs to have an updated link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/inferring-gas-consumption-and-pollution-emission-of-vehicles-throughout-a-city/

“This discovery spurred a collaboration between the CDC and Google to create a map of predicted flu outbreaks based on this data.[15]” Google is no longer doing this. https://research.googleblog.com/2015/08/the-next-chapter-for-flu-trends.html Instead, they are collaborating with Universities researching this.

[16]: Link needs to be added: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/u-air-when-urban-air-quality-inference-meets-big-data/ [17]: Links needs to be added: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-cloud-based-knowledge-discovery-system-for-monitoring-fine-grained-air-quality/

“Wang et al. built a system to get real-time travel time estimates.” No source for this. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/travel-time-estimation-of-a-path-using-sparse-trajectories/

[19] is an article from the Economist: not necessarily fair and balanced: Also not linked. https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21599766-microeconomics-ubers-attempt-revolutionise-taxi-markets-pricing-surge

“Urban computing has a lot of potential to improve urban quality of life by improving the environment people live in, such as by raising air quality and reducing noise pollution.” Fact that isn’t cited.

Abv13 (talk) 17:54, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Updating Old References
Some references are out of date. [1,2,3,4,14,20].

In particular, [1,2,3] are referred to demonstrate the initial definition of “Urban Computing”; [4] gives an overview of traditional sensing methods. However, there should be recent and more updated survey papers about urban computing; these are necessary to give people the overview of the recent development of urban computing. For example: Accordingly, descriptions of these papers should be added to the leading section.
 * Zheng, Yu, Licia Capra, Ouri Wolfson, and Hai Yang. "Urban computing: concepts, methodologies, and applications." ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) 5, no. 3 (2014): 38.
 * Salim, Flora, and Usman Haque. "Urban computing in the wild: A survey on large scale participation and citizen engagement with ubiquitous computing, cyber physical systems, and Internet of Things." International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 81 (2015): 31-48.
 * Jiang, Shan, Gaston A. Fiore, Yingxiang Yang, Joseph Ferreira Jr, Emilio Frazzoli, and Marta C. González. "A review of urban computing for mobile phone traces: current methods, challenges and opportunities." In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGKDD international workshop on Urban Computing, p. 2. ACM, 2013.

[14] gives an example of tracking flu outbreak. Here are some more updated references:
 * Lee, Kathy, Ankit Agrawal, and Alok Choudhary. "Real-time disease surveillance using twitter data: demonstration on flu and cancer." In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp. 1474-1477. ACM, 2013.
 * Lazer, David, Ryan Kennedy, Gary King, and Alessandro Vespignani. "The parable of Google Flu: traps in big data analysis." Science 343, no. 6176 (2014): 1203-1205.
 * Zhou, Yuanchun, Mingjie Tang, Weike Pan, Jinyan Li, Weihang Wang, Jing Shao, Liang Wu, Jianhui Li, Qiang Yang, and Baoping Yan. "Bird flu outbreak prediction via satellite tracking." IEEE Intelligent Systems 29, no. 4 (2014): 10-17.

[20] describes how urban computing improves transportation. Here are some more updated references to add/replace:
 * Calabrese, Francesco, Mi Diao, Giusy Di Lorenzo, Joseph Ferreira, and Carlo Ratti. "Understanding individual mobility patterns from urban sensing data: A mobile phone trace example." Transportation research part C: emerging technologies 26 (2013): 301-313.
 * Shin, Dongyoun, Daniel Aliaga, Bige Tunçer, Stefan Müller Arisona, Sungah Kim, Dani Zünd, and Gerhard Schmitt. "Urban sensing: Using smartphones for transportation mode classification." Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 53 (2015): 76-86.

Important missed sections to be added have been described in Dimension not mentioned.

Xinliupitt (talk) 18:23, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Previous Conversation
This article has no previous discussion. Azizsalim (talk) 17:58, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Article improvement plan
Based on the evaluation we have in the previous section, we would like to improve the current article from the following four perspectives:

Sensing and Data Collection
We would like to improve the article by talking about the different types of data sources each with a brief description and example. We also will use many resources in order to strengthen the paper. Urban sensing and data acquisition consider as one of the key challenges that urban computing has to phase and there are nine different data sources in urban computing as following:
 * Geographical Data: for example; road network data.
 * Traffic Data: there are many methods to collect traffic data for example; loop sensor, surveillance cameras, and floating cars.
 * Mobile Phone Signals: A call detail record (CDR) is the most commonly used data in this type.
 * Commuting Data: This type of data can be acquired from people traveling in cities and that can happen by generating a huge volume of commuting data, such as the card swiping data in a subway system or bus line.
 * Environmental Monitoring Data: Meteorological data includes humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and weather conditions.
 * Social Network Data: data generated from social networks can be used to determine the people mobility in the urban city.
 * Economy: includes any aggregated data that used to represent the economic dynamic for a city, for example; transaction records of credit cards.
 * Energy: data obtained from gas consumption either in the gas stations or in the car itself. Both ways can represent the power consumption or to measure the pollution emission.
 * Health Care: data collected from wearable computing devices that can be used to check people health conditions.

Data Challenges with Urban Computing: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-25446-8_2, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/meeting-the-data-challenges-of-urban-computing/

Cultural and Community
We would like to improve the current article from the perspective of cultural and community by adding the following information:

First, we will identify the importance to view the city from the cultural and historical perspective: most researches in Urban Computing research view “the city” as a generic setting, but “the city” also reflected how we see the world. In this part, we will add the research did by Doreen Massey and her paper “Imagining Globalization: Power-Geometries of Time-Space”.

Second, we will identify the roles of urban computing in culture and community. For example, what urban computing can do for communities and cultures.

Third, we will summarize the current research status of community and cultural side in urban computing from following urban themes based on the paper by Amanda Williams and Paul Dourish: “Imagining the city: The cultural dimensions of urban computing”: 1. Friends and strangers: based on paper by Paulos and Goodman research on the familiar stranger: The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places 2. Mobility: summarized the idea and concept of discretionary mobility and unrestricted discretionary mobility 3. Legibility 4. Integrated perspective NingZou (talk) 18:07, 13 September 2017 (UTC) Ang li (talk) 18:08, 13 September 2017 (UTC) Sunnyxiao2017 (talk) 18:13, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

Computational Challenge
Steps:


 * Selection
 * choosing tuples and attributes
 * pre-processing
 * Cleaning
 * Normalization
 * Transformation
 * Feature extraction
 * Selection a subset of relevant features
 * data mining
 * Classification [Predictive]
 * Clustering [Descriptive]
 * Association Rule Discovery [Descriptive]
 * Sequential Pattern Discovery [Descriptive]
 * Regression [Predictive]
 * Deviation Detection [Predictive]
 * Combination of methods
 * Fuse different data sources at feature level (ex. one feature vector)
 * Use different Data at different Stages (ex. split city to different parts)
 * Feed different data set into different parts of a model simultaneously
 * interpretation/evaluation
 * Ex. 10 fold cross validation

Challenges: Maryam wiki69 (talk) 18:05, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Scalability
 * Dimensionality
 * Complex and Heterogeneous Data
 * Data Quality
 * Data Ownership and Distribution
 * Privacy Preservation

Privacy issues
Development of Privacy Policies Measurements for Privacy Protection Tradeoff between Collected Data Utility and Privacy Xinliupitt (talk) 18:20, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Scenarios (should be defined in the above sections) & Privacy Levels
 * People’s roles in making the policies & Solutions to conflicts
 * Anonymity (example description by referring a paper)
 * Permutation (example description by referring a paper)
 * Differential Privacy Protection (example description by referring a paper)
 * Location Privacy Protection (example description by referring a paper)
 * Differentiate useful and sensitive data attributes
 * Satisfying Regulations