Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure

Abstract

The increasing popularity of mobile computing devices has allowed for new research and application areas. Specifically, urban areas exhibit an elevated concentration of such devices, enabling potential ad-hoc cooperation and sharing of resources among citizens. Here, we argue that people, architecture and technology together provide the infrastructure for these applications and an understanding of this infrastructure is important for an effective design and development. We focus on describing metrics for describing this infrastructure, and elaborate on a set of observation, analysis and simulation methods for capturing, deriving and utilizing those metrics.

Information to Go: Exploring In-Situ Information Pick-Up “In the Wild”

“…Large public displays have gained popularity in industry and research due to their reduced cost and high visual impact [33] in relation to other elements of the urban infrastructure [13]. Such displays can be categorized into reference displays and interactive displays.…”

Good Times?!

“…Without going into excessive detail, the UPI methods (Kostakos et al, 2009) are built on the premise that the city can be viewed as a system, where the variables of interest are the combination of people, space, and technology that together aid in studying and deploying urban pervasive applications 6 . These methods deal with five characteristics of the UPI: mobility (e.g., human distance travelled or visit duration), social structure (e.g., social network analysis metrics such as degree of separation), spatial structure (e.g., space syntax metrics such as integration), temporal rhythms (e.g., time-based distributions of people's activities), and facts and figures (e.g., statistical characteristics such as number of devices detected at a defined area).…”

“…Focusing on the above characteristics, Kostakos et al (2009) have developed methods of observation and analysis that reveal real-world values under these metrics. For example, in their 'augmented gatecount' observation method, gatecounts (using Bluetooth scanners) are used to define the flows of people at several sampled locations within a city.…”

“…That person's response includes both the receptivity to the sampling interruption as well as the content of interruption (e.g., what activities he was engaged in at that moment and with how many people). This response in turn can on the one hand provide a useful feedback loop (Kostakos et al, 2009) into the quality and capacity of objectively measuring and inferring people's activities from such measurements, and on the other hand shed light into what kinds of experiences these people undergo at certain locations within a city (such as the park).…”

“…There are two promising augmentations to the early observation the collected signals are difficult to interpret (especially in noisy environments) and b) these devices are not always feasible for use in user tests. phase, well-suited for dealing with the difficulties in evaluating context-aware applications under mobile and ubiquitous environments: using Urban Pervasive Infrastructure (UPI) methods (Kostakos et al, 2010;Kostakos et al, 2009) and context-aware Experience Sampling Methods (ESMs) (Consolvo & Walker, 2003;Froehlich et al, 2007).…”