Brief encounters: Sensing, modeling and visualizing urban mobility and copresence networks

Abstract

Moving human-computer interaction off the desktop and into our cities requires new approaches to understanding people and technologies in the built environment. We approach the city as a system, with human, physical and digital components and behaviours. In creating effective and usable urban pervasive computing systems, we need to take into account the patterns of movement and encounter amongst people, locations, and mobile and fixed devices in the city. Advances in mobile and wireless communications have enabled us to detect and record the presence and movement of devices through cities. This article makes a number of methodological and empirical contributions. We present a toolkit of algo..