Urban Science Days special: Networks, Visualization and Society

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Event details

Date 18.05.2015
Hour 11:1512:30
Speaker Dr. Mauro Martino  (Cognitive Visualization Lab , Watson Group, IBM)
Location
Category Conferences - Seminars
Abstract
Over the past decade, the development of digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information. Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of our life.
This presentation discusses the visualization design process of interactive tools for that analysis of human mobility. I present five main projects:
In the “Ocean of Information” project we propose a tool to explore human movement dynamics in a metropolitan area in the United States. By analyzing individual cell phone traces, we build a Human-City Interaction System for understanding urban mobility patterns at different user-controlled temporal and geographical scales. Our tool is built to support the exploration and discovery of urban mobility patterns and the daily interactions of millions of people.
The “syn(c)ity” project illustrates the potential of a predictive, in-car recommendation system based on the real-time profiling of both the city and the driver. It connects analysis of the driver’s behavior and personal preferences with geographical data from the current location to successfully identify the set of activities relevant
to the driver’s intentions.
“Obama | One people” is an unprecedented analysis of Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day on January 20, 2009. In partnership with AT&T Labs, we created visualizations of mobile phone call activity that characterize the inaugural crowd and address the questions: Who was in Washington, D.C. for President Obama’s Inauguration Day? When did they arrive, where did they go, and how long did they stay?
“VisPolitics” brings together great political content and visualizations; we create distinct genres of politic data visualizations that are at once comprehensive, analytical, and graphically arresting.
“Cactus Project - Controllability of Complex Networks”; how to control a complex network with minimum number of nodes? For a given directed network, we calculate its maximum matching: a largest set of edges without common heads or tails. From it we identify the minimum set of driver nodes to control. By injecting signals to those driver nodes, we can fully control the network. There is a “cactus” structure underlying the controlled network, which is the “skeleton” for controllability.

Mauro Martino
Mauro Martino is the leader of the Cognitive Visualization Lab (Watson Group, IBM).
Mauro is an Italian artist, designer, inventor, and educator who investigates the impact of artificial intelligence on design.
He was formerly an Assistant Research Professor at Northeastern University working with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at Center for Complex Network Research and with David Lazer and Fellows at The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University.
Previously, he was a research affiliate with the SENSEable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, working on data visualization within the lab’s many projects and his related research project, Urban Interaction Design while earning a PhD in Design and Technologies at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His focus was to innovate the ways we visualize and explore of massive amount of human mobility and telecommunications data, in partnerships with Airsage - AT&T - BT - Orange – Sprint – TDC - Telecom Italia and in different nations Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Italy, USA.
His projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, TEDx Cambridge THRIVE, and Art Galleries including The Serpentine Gallery (London), GAFTA (San Francisco). His work has been featured on the cover of Nature and PNAS, as well as Nature Communication, Nature Physics, Popular Science, The Economist, The Financial Times, WIRED Magazine, The Guardian, BBC News, MIT News, and Harvard News.

Practical information

  • Informed public
  • Free
  • This event is internal

Organizer

  • Emanuele Strano, LaSig, ENAC

Contact

  • emanuele.strano@epfl.ch

Tags

Complex data visualization complex networks digital humanities

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