Good City Life

Dr Daniele Quercia from Bell Labs will present a lecture organised by the UCL Department of Computer Science.

The corporate smart-city rhetoric is about efficiency, predictability, and security. "You'll get to work on time; no queue when you go shopping, and you are safe because of CCTV cameras around you". Well, all these things make a city acceptable, but they don't make a city great. Bell Labs Cambridge are launching goodcitylife.org - a global group of like-minded people who are passionate about building technologies whose focus is not necessarily to create a smart city but to give a good life to city dwellers. The future of the city is, first and foremost, about people, and those people are increasingly networked. We will see how a creative use of network-generated data can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions. Can we rethink existing mapping tools? Is it possible to capture smellscapes of entire cities and celebrate good odours?

Daniele Quercia is currently building the Social Dynamics group at Bell Labs in Cambridge. He has been named one of Fortune magazine's 2014 Data All-Stars, and spoke about "happy maps" at TED. His research has been focusing in the area of urban informatics and received best paper awards from Ubicomp 2014 and from ICWSM 2015, and an honourable mention from ICWSM 2013. He was Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, a Horizon senior researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. He received his PhD from UCL. His thesis was sponsored by Microsoft Research and was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.

Attendees from outside UCL welcome, but please email Steve Marchant (s.marchant@cs.ucl.ac.uk) in advance.