User:Mossabobasir

Viasense (or Via) is a big data company in Toronto, that was founded in Waterloo, Canada. The company developed a analytics engine which is cloud-based and aggregates a lot of location data from cellular networks, sensor networks as well as social networks. The company is known for its ability to derive data about clusters of people and how they move in and out of a city.

Viasense delivers data about how many visitors come in and out of an area, including origin-destination data for commuter and public transit studies. The engine is also designed to discover the amount of time, on average, that most visitors spend in any given area of the city. This data is typically referred to as urban informatics data as it involves dependancy on digital data meshed with the physical world.



One of the data points the company is notorious for is the ability to determine traffic share across multiple locations by analyzing trends of visits made to comparable locations - such as two different movie theatres or golf courses.

Data Sources Viasense accesses anonymous and non-individualized data from wireless communication networks which it aggregates and profiles and then overlays on a map. The data typically includes volume of traffic, duration of visit times and frequency of visitors coming back to the area. The company also relies on low-energy sensors that are strategically placed in commercial and public spaces to collect data and send to the cloud where it is processed by the company's analytics engine. Furthermore, the Viasense engine accesses geo-stamped social media content and interactions which it uses to profile using intelligent data mining techniques including sentiment analysis of a user's posts and content.

The company's Founder, Mossab Otman Basir, is a former Procter & Gamble employee who left to work at a pioneer company in the machine-to-machine arena. In late 2012, the company he worked for was using cellular-data to deliver real-time and historical vehicle traffic flow across major highways and city streets which was later spun off to focus on insights and analytics for public planning organizations, advertisers and large commercial and public centres.

Privacy The media has been known to bundle Viasense with companies that develop tracking technology such as Turnstyle, however the company is known to highlight their focus is on clusters of the population at large and not designed to 'track' individuals at all. The company's website refers to the employment of Privacy by Design (PbD) principles which are inherent limitations in the technology that prohibit the system from accessing and exposing any identifiable information about people that is not voluntarily disclosed by the individual.