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17 Apr 09

Where 2.0 Preview - Building the SENSEable City - O'Reilly Radar

James Turner interviews Andrea Vaccari of MIT's SENSEable City Lab about using internet and mobile technology data (generated by citizens in their day-to-day lives) to figure out how "digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities." (Not sure about turning EVOLUTION into a verb...)

radar.oreilly.com/...-20-preview---building-th.html - Preview

senseable_city mobile_city urbanplanning mit o'reilly andrea_vaccari

  • JT: In a future world where this is more pervasive and available rather than being a one-shot, how would you see urban planners and governments using this data?



    AV: Well, for the urban planners, there is a big, big revolution going on. What happens today is that policies and plans are thought by assumptions. And their effects and imports can be evaluated only after a long time that they are implemented because, again as it was seen before, gathering this information is expensive. It's costly. It's cumbersome. So it's really impossible to get this information in real-time. What is going to happen is that instead of planning the city, the urban planners would actually have to program the city, to configure [it] in real-time because information will flow in real-time. So if you change the direction of the one-way road, you will see almost immediately what the effect on traffic is. If you close an area to cars, you can see immediately what will happen into the mobility in general. And if you create public spaces in a place rather than another, you will see immediately how people will react to that.

  • I recently saw some comments about our work that were asking what's the function of these visualizations. And I have to say they are very useful. And they are extremely important in two different ways. On one side, yes, they are helpful to inform the citizens to educate, in a sense, the public to understand this kind of information; to make them understand that their actions build up on an overarching dynamic system which is the city that really is built of individual choices. But these individual choices emerge as one unique entity which is the city again. So as we somehow try to explain how financial markets work by showing some graphs or charts at the end of the news on TV or on newspapers, I think that we will have to do the same to inform the public about these issues and to let them understand what it means. On the other side, these visualizations are extremely helpful and I have to say successful in helping those who are stakeholders in this revolution, as I was saying before, which includes telecomm operators or municipalities in getting interested into this analysis, in understanding the potential. And really by seeing this data visualized, the decision-maker can grasp it. And these visualizations helped us collecting some of the data that we then used for our quantitative analysis.
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13 May 08

MIT students show power of open cell phone systems (MIT Technology Review)

Fascinating report on MIT class project to design software programs for Android (Google) mobile operating system. Upshot? Location, location, location. All but one of the projects involved location-based applications.

www.technologyreview.com/...20765 - Preview

mit_techreview mit android cell_phones mobile_technology locative_media

  • What do you want your cell phone to be able to do?


    Massachusetts Industry of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system.

  • If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.
20 Dec 07

At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star - New York Times

"Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace."

www.nytimes.com/...19physics.html - Preview

mit opencourseware pedagogy physics teaching

  • The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”

    He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

    “Clarity is the word,” he said.

    Fun also matters.

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