Transcript Exploiting digital footprints to describe tourism

Exploiting digital footprints to
describe tourism
Fabien Girardin and Josep Blat
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
New urban actors
Mobile phones, speed cameras,
pollution sensors, digital cameras,
wireless networks, CCTV systems, bike
sharing systems, etc…
Sentient cities
These new urban actors get embedded in the
fabric of our lives and give us the ability to show
previously invisible urban processes
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Enhancement of our perception
Reveal the city as we experience it
Instantaneous information
Empowerment of the citizen
Example: Reveal Paris through its bike
sharing system
Example: Bicing activity
Example: Mobile phone network
activity
Opportunities local authorities
• Planning was about predict and
accommodate and it becomes more
observe and improve
• Evidence-based urbanism: hard
scientific data to go beyond
assumptions and costly surveys
• Remote-control urbanism: actions
and policies changes from real-time
data of urban dynamics
• Post-occupancy evaluation:
understand the impacts of an
intervention
Example: Tourism
Nowadays tourists leave digital footprints
behind them that reveal their presence
Presence of tourists
Traces left by tourists (Tuscany)
Traces left by tourists (Rome)
Spatio-temporal visualization
Semantics (“Ruins” in Rome)
Tourists activities (sightseeing vs. on the move)
Current limitations
• Provide a glimpse to reality. Sense what is cheap
to sense, plus lack of data interoperability
• Reveal phenomena. But does not explain them.
Need to study the practice that create these
digital footprints
• Need to prove that these data bring at least the
same amount of knowledge than their “manual”
data (e.g. surveys).
• Need of skills and knowledge to analyze and
grasp the significance of these data
NYC Waterfalls
Barcelona
• Themes: Urban Tourism, mobile technologies as
sensors, mobility data mining.
• Actors who showed interest:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Grupo de Tecnologías Interactivas)
Barcelona Media (Laboratorio de Visualización Virtual and
Laboratori de Cultura)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SENSEable City Lab)
Bit Carrier (Bluetooth scanning)
Intelligent Coast (Master Program with UPC)
Barcelona Ecologia
Barcelona City Council
Telefonica R&D(?)