Communications of the ACM
Carnegie Mellon Researchers Create Dynamic View of City Based on Foursquare Check-in Data
The millions of "check-ins" generated by foursquare, the location-based social networking site, can be used to create a dynamic view of a city's workings and character, Carnegie Mellon University researchers say.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
A dynamic view of a city's activities and character that reflects the ever-fluctuating patterns of city life can be generated by the millions of check-ins produced by foursquare, according to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers.
They devised an algorithm that taps the check-ins created when foursquare members visit participating venues or businesses, clustering them based on a blending of the site of the venues and the groups of people who most frequently visit them. The check-in dataset includes such information as user ID, time of day, latitude and longitude, and the name and category of the venue for each check-in. The data is plotted on a map of the city to reveal the area's "Livehoods."
The Livehoods project exploits the spread of smartphones and the location-based services they facilitate, and the researchers are investigating the project's applications to city planning, real estate development, and transportation. "Our goal is to understand how cities work through the lens of social media," says Justin Cranshaw at CMU's Institute for Software Research.
Raz Schwartz, a visiting scholar at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, notes that urban studies typically involve extrapolating meaning from only a small sample of interviewed community residents.
From Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
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