Every day millions of citizens around the world generate massive amounts of geolocalized content using mobile applications and social networks. Especially on Twitter, which could become a sensor of interactions between people and their environment and provide guidelines for planning life in the city. A forgotten issue in urbanism is land use during the night time, with problems such as noise and dirt, which could be improved with this type of tool.
At least this is what Enrique and Vanessa Frías-Martínez believe, brother and sister and computer science researchers at Telefonica Research and the University of Maryland (USA) respectively, who have suggested using geolocalized tweets for urban planning and land use. Their study’s results were published in ‘Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence’.
As Enrique Frías-Martínez explained to SINC, “geolocalized tweets can be a very useful source of information for planning, since it is an activity carried out by a large number of people who provide information on where they are at a specific time and what they are doing”.
The researcher points out that “thanks to the increased use of smartphones, social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it possible to access and produce information ubiquitously”.
