warwick institute for the science of cities
DESCRIPTION
The Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities is part of the University of Warwick and aligned with the Centre for Urban Science and Progress in New York.TRANSCRIPT
WARWICK INSTITUTE FOR THE
SCIENCE OF CITIES
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, MORE THAN HALF OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION LIVES IN URBAN AREAS; IN JUST A FEW MORE DECADES THE WORLD’S POPULATION WILL EXCEED 9 BILLION, 70% OF WHOM WILL LIVE IN CITIES. ENABLING THOSE CITIES TO DELIVER SERVICES EFFECTIVELY, EFFICIENTLY AND SUSTAINABLY, WHILE KEEPING THEIR CITIZENS SAFE, HEALTHY, PROSPEROUS AND WELL-INFORMED, WILL BE AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT UNDERTAKINGS OF THIS CENTURY.
United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-HABITAT) © 2012
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On 23 April 2012, New York’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a historic agreement between New York City, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and a consortium of world-class academic institutions and private technology companies, which led to the creation in New York of a new Center for Urban Science and Progress – CUSP.
The New York Center for Urban Science and Progress has been formed by a consortium of world-class institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly and including the University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, the City University of New York, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and
University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO and AECOM.
CUSP is an applied science research institute dedicated to researching and creating new solutions for the pressing and complex challenges confronting the world’s growing cities. Under the Directorship of Steve Koonin, former US Undersecretary of Energy for Science, Chief Scientist of BP and Provost of the California Institute of Technology, CUSP will eventually play host to 50 principal scientists (30 from the academic partners and 20 research staff from the industrial partners), over 400 Masters students, 100 PhD students and 30 post-docs.
CUSP is a significant component of New York’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative. This research institute will spark new technologies, discoveries and innovations, will create new businesses and jobs, and will educate the workforce for the high-tech urban science sector. New research and technologies developed at CUSP are expected to generate $5.5 billion in economic activity and create a total of 7,700 jobs over the next 30 years.
CUSP’s 460,000 square foot New York campus is nearly complete. It is based at 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn, a vibrant, creative and entrepreneurial neighbourhood.
NEW YORK CENTER FOR URBAN SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
WARWICK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF CITIES
TRAININGFunded through a £3.9M EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre grant, the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities is proving Masters- and PhD-level training for the next generation of urban scientists. In addition to this, and on the back of recognised strength in mathematics, statistics, computing, engineering, business and economics, the University has made a strategic decision to develop a cohort-based ‘data science’ curriculum: A new BSc in Data Science will start in 2014; two new MSc courses (Data Analytics, Information Engineering) were introduced in 2013. Students have the opportunity to work alongside contemporaries from other CUSP partner universities (New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, IIT Mumbai and the University of Toronto) and will engage with industry and city collaborators from the UK and the US.
RESEARCHThrough the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities, Warwick brings its own strengths in areas including: Data Science and Analytics, visualisation, data mining, machine learning, data streaming and on- and off-line analytics; Sensor and Wireless Networks, in areas from microelectronics to the design of resilient overlay networks for large-scale sensor deployment; Social and Media Networks, smarter analysis of textual data and text mining of data drawn from social media and using social informatics
WARWICK, THROUGH ITS NEWLY FOUNDED INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF CITIES (WISC), PROVIDES CUSP WITH A EUROPEAN HUB, ACCESS TO EUROPEAN RESEARCH LEADERS AND FUNDING, AND A WEALTH OF BRIGHT AND COSMOPOLITAN STUDENTS.
to learn more about the ‘mood’ of urban citizens and organisations relating to the issues that surround them; Science and Technology for Health, from the mathematical modelling of the spread of infectious disease, to the study of mental health in large urban areas; Video and Image Processing, including tracking and face recognition in crowds, and forensics of on-line digital documents; Intelligent Infrastructure, such as health monitoring and damage detection of structures such as roads, bridges and buildings; Urban Resilience, in support of security, counter-terrorism, urban governance and urban regeneration and planning; Data Management and Privacy, including issues of data governance and professional practice, to techniques for the anonymisation of data; Energy Solutions, such as the design of cheap efficient solar cells, to energy management.
PEOPLE More than 40 academics working across the university participate in Warwick’s cross-disciplinary Cities research programme, representing a critical mass of internationally recognised expertise. Key individuals include acknowledged experts in key discipline areas – simulation and high-performance computing (Prof Jarvis, Royal Society Industry Fellow), data analytics (Prof Cormode, ACM Distinguished Scientist), social informatics (Prof Procter, former Director of Manchester e-Research
Centre), urban resilience (Prof Coaffee, former Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham), urban water engineering and water quality (Prof Guymer, Director of Research, School of Engineering), text and data mining (Dr Liakata, Visiting Fellow EMBL-EBI, Cambridge), wireless communications, sensors and networks (Dr Guo), structural health monitoring (Dr Laory), computational modelling (Prof Feng, Royal Society Merit Award Holder), streaming analytics (Prof Paterson, FRS), operational research (Prof Sviridenko, Royal Society Merit Award holder), decision analysis (Prof French, Head of Risk Initiative and Statistical Consulting Unit), visualisation (Prof Chalmers, former VP of SIGGRAPH), sensor networks (Prof Gardner, FREng), social science research methodology (Prof Lury, Head of Centre for Interdisciplinary Methods), operational Research and transport (Prof Chen), ethics, security and surveillance (Prof Sorrell, RCUK Global Leadership Fellow), social economics (Prof Scharf, Council Member of the Royal Economics Society).
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THE GOAL OF WISC’S MSc EDUCATION PROGRAMME IS TO PROVIDE STUDENTS WITH THE ABILITY TO USE LARGE-SCALE DATA TO UNDERSTAND AND ADDRESS REAL-WORLD CHALLENGES IN THE URBAN CONTEXT.
THE MSc PROGRAMME LEVERAGES NEW YORK CITY AS A LIVING LABORATORY AND THE STRENGTHS OF OUR ACADEMIC AND INDUSTRIAL PARTNERSHIPS TO CREATE A UNIQUE DATA-DRIVEN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE.
Information Engineering: This new flagship Warwick-based MSc teaches a unique combination of electronic engineering and data analytics, with the aim of applying classroom knowledge to real-world challenges in the urban context.
Data Analytics: The Warwick MSc in Data Analytics is a new course that taps into the pulse of contemporary computer science. The knowledge taught is aimed at addressing real-world challenges related to big data analysis, informatics and urban science. Data Analytics is a top national and international priority, needed in every sector from cyber security to retail.
Both courses have a unique international flavour, as they are operated as part of Warwick’s collaboration with CUSP. Students will have the opportunity to participate in practical industry- and city-related projects in either a major UK city or in New York.
Course StructureMSc INFORMATION ENGINEERING The course comprises leading electronic engineering and computing modules, including: communication networks, system modelling and simulation, advanced wireless systems, data analytics and signal processing. Coupled with these are urban science modules. The taught component is followed by a dissertation project in the third term, which offers the opportunity to apply the knowledge to urban challenges with industrial and civil partners.
MSc DATA ANALYTICS The course comprises a choice of cutting-edge computer science modules, including: data analytics, optimisation, data mining, machine learning, and wireless sensor networks. Students also have the opportunity to undertake several optional modules from topics including computing security, micro-sensor/systems technology and dynamic web-based systems. The dissertation project in the third term is typically undertaken with industry or city partners and allows students to gain experience of practical, multi-disciplinary research.
Both courses are designed so that they can be taken alongside the CUSP Advanced Certificate; those students on this stream will have the opportunity to conduct their project in collaboration with students in New York. The CUSP variants begin with a week-long cohort building programme and immersion in the dynamics of city agencies, city operations, and the CUSP intellectual community. Students are also required to complete an experiential, two term project in which they will work in a multidisciplinary team to solve a real-world data-science problem facing a city agency or industry partner. Students will collect and analyse data, formulate and test solutions, and devise a solution strategy. The project is an invaluable opportunity to contribute to high-impact research leading to improvements in urban data science across the globe.
TRAINING TRAINING
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9The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has recently announced £3.9M in funding for a new Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Urban Science. This CDT will educate scientists in methods to harvest and process big data in order to develop a better understanding of the science of cities, and train them to apply that knowledge to find smarter solutions to urban problems.
Innovative research programmeThis is a new and innovative type of doctoral training programme:
It makes use of multi-institutional collaboration on an international scale;
It promotes an international student experience – students will work alongside a larger student cohort from New York University, City University New York, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Toronto and IIT Mumbai;
It allows students unprecedented access, both in the UK and overseas, to city operations, to utilize existing and newly emerging data streams, and to explore and deploy novel urban sensors in order to model world cities as systems of living networks;
It enables UK students to work alongside industry luminaries, leaders in public service and citizens, to understand, measure and improve urban systems;
It promises to train 50+ PhDs who have received discipline-defining training from six world-class institutions.
Contacts, collaboration and experienceThe centre for doctoral training involves partnership with a number of world cities, including Birmingham, London, New York, Mumbai, Toronto and Singapore. Several industry partners are also backing the centre, including IBM, URS, AT&T, Cisco, E.ON, and British Gas.
OpportunitiesPhD opportunities are available for full and part-time students. Competitive scholarships are available and we welcome enquiries from EU and international students, and those that are government, industry or self-funded. The application process takes about four weeks and involves an informal telephone interview as part of the selection process.
TRAINING
TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION OF URBAN SCIENTISTS
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9“The CDT will provide EPSRC-funded PhD students with an unprecedented opportunity to work with industry experts and alongside our city officials on real-world urban science problems. Seldom has the opportunity arisen to develop scientific solutions that will have direct impact on billions of the world’s population.”Deputy Mayor, New York City
“Students will conduct applied research and development in this growing and vital area and graduate with all the skills, both technical and complementary, to make immediate impact and thus would gain a flying start to their careers.”IBM
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111. WHO NEEDS A MAYOR? WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ELECTED MAYORS IN PROVIDING STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP TO CITIES?
This is the question answered in the report of the Warwick Commission on Elected Mayors and City Leadership, published on 16th April 2012 and based on 42 interviews with elected mayors, council leaders and their staff in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
On 3rd May 2012, registered voters in several cities in England were asked to decide whether they should have a new system of local leadership. To some this was regarded as the latest stage in the evolution of local government in England; to others it represented an unnecessary concentration of power in an apolitical post.
The question of whether mayors are the right system of democratic governance was not scrutinised in the report. Rather, the Commission set out the background to this development by examining the history of local government, considered why elected mayors have risen to the top of the political agenda, and explored what existing mayors and their officers, and opponents, consider to be the advantages and disadvantages of directly elected mayors. The report also considered the optimal scale and structure for the offices of elected mayor.
The Commission describes the rationale behind elected mayors as follows: “The history of local government has consistently reproduced the centripetal forces of the centre versus the centrifugal forces of the locale and, by
and large, England has ended up with one of the most centralised governments in the world. In turn, that seems to have demobilised the electorate in many localities and one of the underlying thrusts of the Localism agenda of the government is to reinvigorate the local body politic by giving power away to elected mayors.”
The data accumulated in the study points to the opportunity presented by this system to capitalise on local identity, labour and knowledge. Directly elected mayors also offer the possibility of greater visibility, accountability and coordinative leadership. Conversely, there is a danger that mayors are elected whose popularity exceeds their leadership potential, a risk which is mitigated by a limited term (four years) and relative political independence.
The Commission makes several recommendations, including the need to assess whether the electorate is relatively happy with the current structure of governance, the need to establish indicators of success by which we can evaluate the performance of mayors, the requirement to identify opportunity for change in places where change is needed, the need to ensure that the leader is not isolated and the need to trust the electorate to make the right decisions.
“Ultimately directly elected mayors may be a way of answering the most important question at the heart of governance: what is the purpose of politics? If politics is about how we mediate our individual and collective conflicts then we had better pay some
attention to reinvigorating the body-politic: politics is too important to be left to politicians.”
This Commission was led by Professor Wyn Grant from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and Professor Keith Grint from the Warwick Business School.
Elected Mayors and City Leadership
Summary Report of the Third Warwick Commission
What is the Role of Elected Mayors in Providing Strategic Leadership to Cities?
RESEARCH
DELIVERING RESEARCH FOR URBAN INNOVATION
CASE STUDIESThe case studies on the following pages show how the University of Warwick, in collaboration with city and industry partners, is already transforming the knowledge of the urban environment and bringing improvements to the lives of urban populations.
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132. KEEP THE NOISE DOWN! OPV-BASED ENERGY HARVESTING SENSORS FOR URBAN NOISE POLLUTION
In the past 24 months ~200,000 noise complaints have been logged by the 311 city service hotline for New York City (Source: NYC Open Data). This is an average of around 274 calls a day, and means that roughly 1 in 84 New York City residents will lodge a noise complaint with the city in any given year.
Studies in urban noise pollution over the past 40 years have established correlations between urban noise and well-being, education and mental health. Several studies have linked noise to childhood development¹; subsequent research² has correlated chronic noise exposure with a variety of health issues, including cardiovascular stress in children. As a result, a variety of public policy initiatives have been taken in cities in the United States and Japan. More recent studies have leveraged advances in telecommunications and computer technology to measure urban noise more effectively. In 2009, Sony measured personal exposure to noise using smartphones, enabling the development of crowd-sourced noise maps of urban areas³. A similar project was undertaken by Motivity in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco in 2010 using stationary decibel meters at key intersections⁴.
London’s strategic noise policy was defined in March 2004 and more recently New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a policy to control urban noise pollution. DEFRA’s Noise Mapping
England project, which demonstrates how noise mapping can be built from computer modelling, using inputs such as traffic flow data, road/rail type and geographic features such as buildings and the shape of the ground, was instigated as a result of European directives in this area.
Most of these studies are concerned with ambient noise (e.g. background noise such as traffic). These are clearly useful since they enable noise maps to be produced as part of transport strategies, assessing alternative transport options (fuel cell buses) and different highways strategies (removing road humps) etc. However, there are other noise agents which are currently not mapped: noise from neighbours, shops/bars, road- and building-works, commercial dwellings etc. At present there is no mechanism for recording street-level or building noise in real-time, nor has there been work on associating noise maps with correlative data such as police complaints, crime records and medical reports etc.
According to Columbia Mailman School of Public Health researcher Robyn Gershon, 20 million adults and 10 million children in the United States suffer from “noise-induced hearing loss.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is responsible for workplace noise in the US. The agency stated in 2012 that it would take 138 years to inspect every workplace in the US. At the University of Warwick we are building new technology for the real-time street and building monitoring of urban noise. Using third-generation organic photovoltaic (OPV)-based
autonomous wireless sensors and employing environmentally friendly components, including silicon-based battery alternatives, we are developing and deploying energy harvesting noise sensors as part of CUSP New York’s Living Laboratory.
The sensors used in this project are an innovative technology developed through a partnership between Molecular Solar Ltd (a Warwick spin-out company established to commercialise third-generation solar cell technology) and the University of Warwick’s Engineering and Computer Science Departments (whose expertise includes novel microsensor technology and distributed wireless sensor network design). The sensors can equally sense humidity, temperature, light, gases (CO, NO₂, CO₂, H₂, CH₂), VOCs (alcohols, ketones, aldehydes, toluene etc.) and explosives. The application space is therefore diverse, and spans environment, government, healthcare, national security and military applications.
¹ Bronzaft and McCarthy, 1975; Bronzaft, 1981² Evans, Hygge, and Bullinger, 1995³ Maisonneuve et al, 2009⁴ TenderNoise, 2011
3. READING THE RIOTSINVESTIGATING ENGLAND’S SUMMER OF DISORDER
Reading the Riots is the only research study into the causes and consequences of the 2011 summer riots, which took place in several London boroughs and in cities and towns across England. The aim of the study was to produce evidence-based social research that would help to explain how the rioting spread.
This Guardian-commissioned study carried out confidential interviews with hundreds of people across several cities. In addition to this, more than 2.6m riot-related tweets were analysed by Professor Rob Procter¹ and his team.
Social media indisputably played a key role in the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Libya and many commentators, including Malcolm Gladwell (New Yorker), Laurie Penny (New Statesman) and David Kravets (Wired), have sought to understand and articulate the importance of social media during moments of historic crisis.
How we communicate in moments of crisis is important, and the medium that carries the message clearly influences the message itself. The instantaneous nature of social media, and the ability for the everyman to broadcast ideas that are unlimited by publication schedules or censorship, makes understanding social media and its use and influence essential for understanding communication in modern society.
When David Cameron addressed an emergency session of parliament convened in the aftermath of the riots,
he identified the role played by social media: “Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media. We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”
Yet such action may be ill-conceived. Studies of the use and influence of social media are in their infancy, and shutting the services down is not the only option. For example, West Midlands Police posted their own messages on Twitter in response to rumours of planned disorder, while in Libya social network sites were used to broadcast messages from hospitals looking for blood donors.
Social networking represents a new communication tool, which can be harnessed for the social good.
¹ Professor Rob Procter has recently been appointed WISC Professor of Social Informatics at the University of Warwick. Prior to this he was Director of eResearch at the University of Manchester and an academic in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
RIOTERS ATTACK LONDON ZOO AND RELEASE ANIMALS
At 9pm on Monday 8th August Twitter user @Twiggy_Garcia becomes one of the first to circulate unconfirmed reports that rioters have broken into London Zoo and are releasing some of the animals.
Rumours such as the London Zoo story quickly spread in a viral-like way over non-hierarchical networks. The rumour is widely re-tweeted, including by influential users with many thousands of followers. Within 30 minutes tigers are reported to be roaming in Primrose Hill.
Opposition to this story surfaces 13 minutes later, while the rumour continues to circulate on an ever-growing social network.
As the story spreads, an increasing number of followers question the validity of the reports. The pictures of tigers roaming in Primrose Hill are found to be the same as those taken of a big cat that escaped from a circus in Italy.
The ‘tiger story is untrue’ sentiment gathers pace, and by 10.50pm, less than two hours after the rumour started, there is significant opposition to the story. Despite this, loud pockets of Twitter still believe the story to be true and it is not until 1am on Tuesday 9th August that the network associated with this story begins to dissolve.
RESEARCH
DELIVERING RESEARCH FOR URBAN INNOVATION
RESEARCH
DELIVERING RESEARCH FOR URBAN INNOVATION
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154. MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS ENSURING PRIVACY IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT MONITORING
While the increasing amount of data captured in the urban environment holds great promise for shaping life in the cities of tomorrow, there is also growing unease over the volume and nature of data that is being built up about individual citizens. Efforts made for the benefit of the many – such as installing sensors, adding GPS to taxis, tracking transit cards – run the risk of being used to focus on the actions of the few.
To address these concerns, and limit the potential for misuse of data, Warwick researchers have been developing technologies for anonymisation of data.
These are intended to make it impossible to isolate the signals of individuals in collected data. There is a tightrope to walk here, since while we want to mask out the pattern of any individual, we still want true group behaviour patterns to be well-captured.
Anonymisation turns out to be a challenging problem. Well-intentioned simple approaches usually turn out to be deficient in sometimes subtle ways. Consider collecting GPS readings from smartphones as people go about their day. It might seem that if we remove the details of who provided each trace, their movements are protected. But humans are creatures of habit, and most daily traces begin and end in a residential area, from which a home address, and hence a name, can be extracted.
This name can then be attached to the rest of the trace, showing where else that individual travelled.
Instead, more complex approaches are required which draw on concepts from mathematics, computer science and statistics to add just enough random fluctuation to data to mask the individual’s information. Models such as “differential privacy” set a standard of data masking. Then each new type of data (sensor, GPS, transit) requires novel methods to reach this standard.
Professor Graham Cormode (Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick) has been developing techniques that can help anonymise urban data. This work is in conjunction with a team of international privacy experts from universities such as Duke, North Carolina State in the US, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; and businesses such as AT&T. These efforts have resulted in state-of-the-art tools for handling data that represents spatial distributions (maps) and data warehouses. Ongoing work is addressing the case of mobility data, as individuals move around geographic areas leaving trajectories. The ultimate aim of this research is to develop general tools which can be used to anonymise new types of data effectively. The approach is to build effective, lightweight models of data that capture the core characteristics of the data distribution. The anonymisation then gently perturbs the model parameters to hide the contribution of individuals, but remaining true to the original input.
5. ADMINISTRATIVE DATA TASKFORCEIMPROVING ACCESS FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY
The importance of competitive research in underpinning economic growth is widely recognised. The UK Government’s recent Open Data White Paper1 reinforces the importance of ensuring effective access to national data collections for research and policy development.
National administrative data such as social security, tax and education records, relating to individuals or organisations, have the potential to provide a robust UK-wide evidence base for research and policy evaluation. The Administrative Data Taskforce (ADT) was formed in December 2011 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust. Professor Peter Elias CBE, of the Institute of Employment Research at the University of Warwick, acted as ESRC Strategic Advisor for Data Resources as part of this task force.
The Taskforce found that access to these data has been difficult, largely due to concerns about the identification of individuals and also because of legal restrictions on the use to which the data can be put. It was recognised that the highest international standards of governance, professional practice and public engagement would need to be adopted. New legislation would also be needed to enable the efficient sharing and linking of data, and a new system would need to be resourced by the relevant funding agencies to ensure the integrity, sustainability and utility of the data.
The Taskforce made several key recommendations²:
• An Administrative Data Research Centre (ADRC) should be established in each of the four countries in the UK;
• Legislation be enacted to facilitate research access to administrative data and to allow data linkage between departments to take place more efficiently;
• A single UK-wide researcher accreditation process, built on best national and international practice, should be established;
• A strategy for engaging with the public should be instituted;
• Sufficient funds should be put in place to support improved research access to, and linkage between, administrative data;
The Taskforce concluded by recommending that the funders, the ARDCs, the Governing Board and the data holders, combine to become a new data resource for the UK through a UK Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN).
The UK Government has expressed agreement with the direction of travel set by the Administrative Data Taskforce and supports the broad recommendations and ambitions of the report. The UK Government has begun working with the Economic and Social Research Council and others in developing significant data resources. In October 2013 the four ADRCs were established at the Universities of Southampton, Queens University Belfast, Edinburgh and Swansea.
Access to data through the Administrative Data Research Network will significantly strengthen the ability of UK researchers and policy-makers to contribute to a deeper understanding of social and economic issues facing urban society across the UK.
Professor Elias was Chair of the recent meeting on the Economic Value of Urban Data at CUSP in New York.
¹ http://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Open_data_White_Paper.pdf
² http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ier/people/pelias/uk_data_forum_strategy_printed_version_2013-2018.pdf
RESEARCH
DELIVERING RESEARCH FOR URBAN INNOVATION
RESEARCH
DELIVERING RESEARCH FOR URBAN INNOVATION
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MUNICIPAL AGENCY LINKS PROVIDE US WITH REAL-WORLD DATA
OUR FOCUS IS ON DEVELOPING RESEARCH-LED SOLUTIONS TO HELP THOSE AGENCIES TO ADDRESS EXISTING AND EMERGING CITY CHALLENGES.
SMARTER BUILDINGS
Buildings that can monitor occupancy and
adjust lighting, heating and ventilation to save energy,
possibly also taking account of holiday patterns, weather conditions
and forecasts.
MOBILE SENSING
Using mobile phones and other portable
electronic equipment as sensors.
SMARTER CONNECTIVITY
It is estimated that 22 billion devices will be connected to
the Internet by 2020. There is considerable potential in exploring practical applications of this new
interconnected infrastructure for societal and business
city needs.
SMARTER INFORMATION
GATHERINGSources of information include
data on people, preferences and behaviour. Anonymised data
show that activity flows can be used to deliver personalised and intelligent information
to residents and visitors.
SMARTER CITY
REPAIR
SENSITIVE DATATECHNOLOGY
TRANSFER
SMARTER SENSORS
The development and deployment of urban
instrumentation for data collection across city
infrastructures, driving informatics, operations and strategic decision
making.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND NETWORKS
Acquiring and analysing data from social media
and other online sources to understand the behaviour, preferences, opinions, and
social structures of people.
SMARTER TRAFFIC
Mobile telephone apps in combination with parking
sensors can be used to alert drivers that there are free parking spaces in their vicinity. Real-time traffic flow information can also
be used to divert emergency vehicles to uncongested
streets.SMARTER
INTERFACESUrban informatics and smart visualisation are
needed to synthesise and interpret vast new volumes
of city-wide information.
URBAN OBSERVATORY
SMARTER INFRA-
STRUCTURE
SMARTER VIDEO
SIMULATION AND
MODELLING
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COLLABORATION WITH WISC
“We offer up the City as a demonstrator
to trial solutions and evaluate the benefits
to Birmingham citizens. We also offer the
opportunity for the placement of students,
so that they may work alongside city
officials to understand the application,
potential impact and possible pitfalls of
their work.”
Leader, Birmingham City Council
“World-class expertise in systems-thinking
applied to cities will require advanced
modelling, smart technologies, urban design,
behavioural and social sciences, private
finance and major infrastructure know-
how, and business model innovation.”
Technology Strategy Board
Despite these strengths, 40% of Birmingham’s population lives in areas described as amongst the most deprived 10% in England and there is a life expectancy gap of 10 years between the best and worst wards. WISC is working alongside city officials from Birmingham City Council, investigating and proposing new solutions to urban problems, with direct benefit to local businesses and to the local economy.
WISC’s collaboration with cities extends across the UK, to cities including London, and internationally, to include New York, Mumbai and Singapore.
WISC has also received support from several leading national and international organisations, including AT&T, British Gas, DEMOS, E.ON, IBM, Metropolitan Police, National Grid, Technology Strategy Board and URS. Collaborative projects range from the modelling of cities as systems of systems, the development of platforms for social media analytics, crowd dynamics and mobility tracking, urban data warehousing and data analytics, to the development of new sensor technology for urban monitoring.
OPPORTUNITIES
EDUCATION WISC is committed to: (1) developing and delivering the curriculum that will define the professional standards for urban science, (2) establishing urban science as an academic field of study and a focus of scientific inquiry through the training of future researchers, (3) providing an educational programme to meet the needs of a diverse multi-disciplinary student population. Training is offered through Masters degrees and PhDs, which can be taken on a full- or part-time basis, and through professional development courses in specialist areas. Whether a student, an educator, or a professional practitioner, staff at WISC would be pleased to take you through the educational opportunities at WISC.
INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS The UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills estimate that the global market for integrated citywide solutions is £200bn a year. Opportunities for knowledge transfer between countries and continents are also significant; there are well over 1,000 cities in the world with populations in excess of 500,000. The UK, through partnerships with other world cities and research organisations, has the opportunity to lead in this space. Training experts to address these problems requires major and coordinated commitment from a large, international group of experts: domain experts from cities who can present the challenges; analytical experts to give the tools to understand them; computational experts to help scale the
BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL IS THE LARGEST LOCAL AUTHORITY IN EUROPE AND LOOKS AFTER A CITY OF OVER A MILLION RESIDENTS, SITTING AT THE HEART OF A £94 BILLION CITY REGION ECONOMY; PLACING IT WITHIN THE TOP 100 CITIES IN THE WORLD.
THERE ARE SEVERAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR COLLABORATING WITH WISC:
solutions to large-scale datasets; policy experts to address the impact of change; industry experts to implement solutions. There are numerous opportunities for industry partnership at WISC; from participating in education programmes, working alongside our pool of talented students, to providing domain data for study and interpretation. WISC’s Industry Partnership Network is open to SMEs through to large international corporations.
RESEARCH In focusing on the means to gather city-scale data, and the apparatus to transform this data into knowledge, WISC’s research programme capitalises on emerging developments in big data and in interdisciplinary solutions to the world’s urban challenges. Many of WISC’s 50+ PhD students will work with industry partners on developing long-term, robust solutions with real business value. Several companies have backed the formation of WISC, including IBM, URS, AT&T, E.ON, British Gas and Cisco, and several are co-supervising and sponsoring one or more PhD students. Industry-focussed research projects vary in duration, from several weeks to several years. Please contact WISC’s Business Development Manager for more information on the process of establishing and engaging in collaborative research.
KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE WISC runs several outreach events throughout the year, from research workshops, Partner Network events, to Citizen Science events to engage the general public. Sign up to WISC’s Knowledge Exchange for regular newsletters, updates on research, details of public seminars, and for an opportunity to attend the annual cities showcase.
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STEPHEN JARVISStephen Jarvis is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Research in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.
He leads an internationally recognised research group working in the field of parallel/distributed systems, visualisation and digital forensics. The group’s work has been used by the US Navy Ocean System Centre in San Diego, the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, DARPA and NASA. The group also has an established record of spin-out companies, including Allinea Software which has been recognised as one of the 100 fastest growing private companies in the world. Stephen is widely published in this field and has chaired several IEEE/ACM international conferences and workshops.
In 2009 Stephen was awarded a prestigious Royal Society Industry Fellowship in support of his industry-focussed work on high-performance computing. He acted as co-organiser for one of the UK’s High End Scientific Computing Training Centres between 2005 and 2011, and he currently leads the £3.9M EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Urban Science and Progress at the University of Warwick.
He is a former faculty member of the University of Oxford Computing Laboratory. Stephen is currently Director at the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities (WISC).
ROB PROCTERRob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.
Previously, he was Director of the Manchester eResearch Centre at Manchester University. His research interests lie in the study of the uses individuals and organisations make of distributed digital systems. A major part of his work in the past 10 years has focused on the development of computational research infrastructure, tools and methods for analysing ‘big data’. Recently, he has been applying these tools and methods to the study of social media.
Rob led a multidisciplinary team to work with the Guardian/LSE on the Reading the Riots project, which analysed tweets sent during the August 2011 UK riots, with a particular emphasis on the examination of social media and the propagation of rumours. His ongoing research on social media analytics includes the development of a scalable social media analytics platform as part of the JISC and ESRC supported Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS), a study of ‘hate speech’ in social media and the use of social media to build statistical models of social phenomena.
Rob is widely published in this field, he is editor of the Health Informatics Journal and a member of the editorial boards of the Enterprise Information Management Journal and the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies.
WARWICK’S EXPERTISE IS PROVEN THROUGH OUR ESTABLISHED AND NEWLY-APPOINTED STAFF
IAN GUYMERIan Guymer is Professor of Civil Engineering and Deputy Head (Research) in the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick.
A Chartered Engineer and Member of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, he is also a member of the Water Experts Panel of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Ian has been instrumental in guiding the development of the Civil Engineering Group, integrating new research faculty, developing unique laboratory facilities and the only UK MSc in Tunnelling and Underground Space.
His research interests are concerned with the transport and mixing processes related to soluble pollutants and contaminated fine sediments in river, coastal and urban drainage systems. More specifically the research focuses on quantifying fundamental mixing processes, developing robust numerical modelling techniques and applying the knowledge to describe their effects on natural water quality processes and ecological impact. Much of this work has been undertaken in large UK & European hydraulics laboratories and in full-scale field studies. It has received funding from the major UK research councils, water utilities, the Environment Agency, the Highways Agency, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The work has also attracted industrial support from Unilever, Syngenta and Lonza.
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JON COAFFEEJon Coaffee is a Professor in Urban Geography in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) in the Social Sciences Faculty at the University of Warwick where he directs the Resilient Cities Laboratory, and holds an Exchange Professor post at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).
Jon is an international expert in urban resilience. His research focuses upon the interplay of physical and socio-political aspects of resilience in the city and he has also published widely, especially on the impact of terrorism and other security concerns on the functioning of urban areas. During this research he has worked closely with a range of private and governmental stakeholders to ensure his research has real-world impact. This work has been published in multiple disciplinary areas such as geography, town planning, political science and civil engineering. Most notably he published Terrorism Risk and the City (2003), The Everyday Resilience of the City (2008), Terrorism Risk and the Global City: Towards Urban Resilience (2009) and Sustaining and Securing the Olympic City (2011). His work has been supported by a significant number of EU and UK Research Council grants. He runs the blogging site urbanresilience.net.
MARIA LIAKATAMaria Liakata is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford on learning pragmatic knowledge from text and her research interests include text and data mining, natural language processing, biological text mining, computational semantics, scientific discourse structure and sentiment analysis. Her work has contributed to advances in knowledge discovery from corpora, automation of scientific experimentation and automatic extraction of information from the scientific literature.
Maria’s recent work has looked at the analysis of emotions in suicide notes and she is in the process of porting this work to social media, to help detect mental illness and prevent crises. Maria remains a Visiting Fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK where she holds an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Maria co-chairs the Linguistic Annotation & Interoperability with Discourse Workshop at the Association for Computational Linguistics annual conference.
GRAHAM CORMODE Graham Cormode is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick.
Prior to this, he has been a senior researcher at AT&T Laboratories and Bell Laboratories, both in New Jersey USA. His postdoctoral studies were at the DIMACS centre in Rutgers University, and his PhD is from the University of Warwick.
His work considers aspects of managing and working with large amounts of data, with particular emphasis on privacy and anonymisation, streaming data processing, integrity of computations, and large-scale analytics. This work has particular application to handling the vast amounts of complex data generated from cities and citizens as they go about their daily lives.
Graham is an Associate Editor for the ACM Transaction on Database Systems and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is widely published in international journals and competitive peer-reviewed conference proceedings and his work has received best paper awards from the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering and the conference on Very Large Databases.
IRWANDA LAORYIrwanda Laory is an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick.
He has a BSc in Civil Engineering from Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, a MSc in civil engineering Bauhaus Universität Weimar (Germany), and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). His research interests are in structural health monitoring, intelligent infrastructure, data interpretation methods, anomaly detection, measurement system design and computer-aided engineering. Irwanda is a member the International Society for Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure (ISHMII), the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE) and the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE).
WEISI GUOWeisi Guo is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering where he is the joint coordinator of the city research theme in the School of Engineering.
He holds MEng, MA, and PhD degrees in general and information engineering from the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie with wireless networks, mobile sensing, smart cities, and system modelling. He is the main author of an industrially benchmarked wireless system simulator (VCEsim) and he has extensive industrial experience with leading cellular network operators and vendors.
Weisi is widely published in the field of wireless network optimisation and is the winner of an EPSRC Early Career award together with a University of Sheffield Early Career Award for contribution made to low carbon communication systems.
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RICHARD KENNYRichard Kenny is Head of Strategic Development at Birmingham City Council.
Richard supports the Council Leadership, Chief Executive and Strategic Directors, on the strategic development of the council and its city. He leads and delivers strategic developments and aligns and adapts the policy and strategy development and work programmes of council directorates, and academic, other public, private and third sector agencies activities, with the Council Leadership priorities, to maximise impact and benefit for the city. Richard recently developed and led the bid that won the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge for the city in 2012 with the highly innovative and challenging ‘Modelling Birmingham’ programme.
Richard is a highly experienced thought leader and strategist for cities and an experienced director of programmes and projects. He has held senior positions at national, regional and local levels
working for two major UK cities, a regional assembly, central government, and within the health and policing sectors to deliver better outcomes for people, places and communities.
Richard is a Board Member of the Centre for Geographical Economic Research, University of Cambridge, a collaborative research partnership funded by the ESRC, exploring economic growth issues, looking at recession, resilience and recovery in UK cities and regions and is an advisor to and writes for the Warwick PolicyLab think-tank.
Richard has degrees from Sheffield and Aston universities and holds an MBA from the University of Warwick.
LARRY ATWOODLarry Atwood is a Research Development Officer for the University of Warwick Sustainable Cities Global Research Priority and WISC.
In this role he advises on all aspects of preparing research project proposals to national, European and international funding schemes. This includes assistance in developing project consortia, budget planning and partnership building.
By training a forester and geographer, since 1990 he has worked in various capacities within the UK Research Councils (SERC/EPSRC) and held research administration posts at University College Northampton, University of Worcester. More recently he has worked in the social enterprise and logistics sectors.
SAM HARDYSam leads business collaboration in the fields of Energy and Sustainable Cities, supporting the University’s Global Research Priorities in these areas.
Sam has worked at the interface between academia and industry for ten years; during this time he has led high tech start-ups and built strong relationships with industrial partners, including leading on the University’s strategic alliance with National Grid. Sam supported the development of and now project manages Warwick’s contribution to FlexDGrid, a £17m project led by Western Power Distribution and funded through Ofgem’s Low Carbon Network Fund.
In addition to these UK-based activities Sam heads up the University’s corporate engagement activities in Brazil relating to energy and urban science, and supports business collaborations in Warwick’s partnership in the Center for Urban Science and Progress in New York. Sam has a BSc in Biological Sciences and a PhD in Virology from the University of Warwick.
NARUSHIGE SHIODENaru Shiode is an Associate Professor in Urban Studies in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick.
He has previously worked in the fields of spatial analysis and GIS at University College London, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Cardiff University. He holds BEng and MEng degrees in urban and regional analysis from University of Tokyo and worked on his PhD at UCL on the analysis of digital cities and information space.
Naru has published widely in the fields of GIS & geo-visualisation, urban & regional analysis, and geographies of information & digital cities. He has an active interest in the quantitative appreciation of how socio-economic activities unfold within an urban context over space and time. His current research focuses on the development of network-based methods for exploring the dynamics of urban landscape, urban risks and spatial inequality with the aim of improving the safety and welfare of the urban environment. Their applications range from analyses of crime and traffic accidents to those of ageing communities and ethnically diverse communities, many of which are carried out in collaboration with academic and non-academic partners including local governments, police forces, and the retail sector.
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CONTACT
Professor Stephen JarvisDirector
Warwick Institute for the Science of CitiesUniversity of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL United Kingdom
