[1608.00462] Are Safer Looking Neighborhoods More Lively? A Multimodal Investigation into Urban Life
Authors: Marco De Nadai, Radu L. Vieriu, Gloria Zen, Stefan Dragicevic, Nikhil Naik, Michele Caraviello, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri
To appear in the Proceedings of ACM Multimedia Conference (MM), 2016. October 15 - 19, 2016, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Policy makers, urban planners, architects, sociologists, and economists are interested in creating urban areas that are both lively and safe. But are the safety and liveliness of neighborhoods independent characteristics? Or are they just two sides of the same coin? In a world where people avoid unsafe looking places, neighborhoods that look unsafe will be less lively, and will fail to harness the natural surveillance of human activity. But in a world where the preference for safe looking neighborhoods is small, the connection between the perception of safety and liveliness will be either weak or nonexistent. In this paper we explore the connection between the levels of activity and the perception of safety of neighborhoods in two major Italian cities by combining mobile phone data (as a proxy for activity or liveliness) with scores of perceived safety estimated using a Convolutional Neural Network trained on a dataset of Google Street View images scored using a crowdsourced visual perception survey. We find that: (i) safer looking neighborhoods are more active than what is expected from their population density, employee density, and distance to the city centre; and (ii) that the correlation between appearance of safety and activity is positive, strong, and significant, for females and people over 50, but negative for people under 30, suggesting that the behavioral impact of perception depends on the demographic of the population. Finally, we use occlusion techniques to identify the urban features that contribute to the appearance of safety, finding that greenery and street facing windows contribute to a positive appearance of safety (in agreement with Oscar Newman's defensible space theory). These results suggest that urban appearance modulates levels of human activity and, consequently, a neighborhood's rate of natural surveillance
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Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016 https:/
Richard Macksey's Humanities Center @JohnsHopkins celebrates 50 years as intellectual community http:/
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I have to wonder at the horrible inefficiency of the social media strategy of the @ALifeXV enterprise.
Why do they register and set up a new twitter and facebook account every year and then spend the time refollowing people (and hoping that they're followed back again to rebuild what should be a continuing and built in audience)? Why not just have a relatively generic twitter handle, and just change the display name every year? Then their presumably returning audience will already be following them? The engagement on the user's part will have to be much better as a result as well. Surely staff time would be better spent doing this. There's also the question of how smart their conference must be if their social media strategy is so primitive. Do they know they could also swap @twitter handles on successive accounts if they really wanted to go that route?
What happens if I decide to register the twitter accounts @alifeXVI, @alife16, etc. well in advance of the next conference? This is a total social media fail.
Admittedly @14thALIFE had such a paltry existence, perhaps starting from scratch wasn't too bad an idea, but let's please be thinking about what is going to happen next year...
@Info_Universum You should invite Arieh Ben-Naim and @ChristophAdami to speak at The Information Universe Conference http:/
Had a lovely conference call with Kindle Direct Publishing's White Glove Program @AmazonKDP. Can't wait to hear more!