Together with the Urbanscope team, we gave a TedX talk on the topics and results of the project here at Politecnico di Milano. The talk was actually given by our junior researchers, as we wanted it to be a choral performance as opposed to the typical one-man show.
The message is that cities are not mere physical and organizational devices only: they are informational landscapes where places are shaped more by the streams of data and less by the traditional physical evidences. We devise tools and analysis for understanding these streams and the phenomena they represent, in order to understand better our cities.
Two layers coexist: a thick and dynamic layer of digital traces – the informational membrane – grows everyday on top of the material layer of the territory, the buildings and the infrastructures. The observation, the analysis and the representation of these two layers combined provides valuable insights on how the city is used and lived.
You can now find the video of the talk on the official TedX YouTube channel:
Urbanscope is a research laboratory where collection, organization, analysis, and visualization of cross domain geo-referenced data are experimented.
The research team is based at Politecnico di Milano and encompasses researchers with competencies in Computing Engineering, Communication and Information Design, Management Engineering, and Mathematics.
The aim of Urbanscope is to systematically produce compelling views on urban systems to foster understanding and decision making. Views are like new lenses of a macroscope: they are designed to support the recognition of specific patterns thus enabling new perspectives.
If you enjoyed the show, you can explore our beta application at:
http://www.urbanscope.polimi.it
and discover the other data science activities we are conducting at the Data Science Lab of Politecnico, DEIB.
Marco Brambilla 