Social media provides opportunities to examine urban phenomena at scale, and we believe that studying cities in the Global South through citizen-contributed data and AI-driven analytics should be a priority of multimedia research. However, little work has been done in our community, and we argue that this contributes to a double blind side problem. We exemplify this situation by studying Ma3Route, a mobile social media channel to crowdsource and broadcast transit reports in Nairobi, Kenya. Using multimedia data from its Twitter stream, we first conduct a descriptive analysis that shows an active community generating rich traffic-related reports, and then discover latent topics that identify both regular and ephemeral thematic clusters of reports involving accidents, traffic conditions, and attitudes of citizens towards authorities. In the second place, we conduct a deep learning-based analysis of Ma3Route images to understand the kind of visual content shared in the platform, and that shows limitations of using deep neural network models trained with data largely coming from the US and Europe, which do not fully match the reality and diversity of other world regions. We conclude by presenting a multidisciplinary research agenda for future work in this domain. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing; Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.