Urban Dynamics Combining Mobile Social Media Mes

Event Date: 04 Sep 2015 03:30 AM - 04 Sep 2015 04:30 AM

Event Venue: Singapore-ETH Centre, Value Lab Asia, CREATE Lvl 6

Urbanisation is a set of interrelated processes, the most visible among them are changes in the built environment. Relating those changes to human activity as expressed through online social media messages may shed light on urban dynamics currently intractable through existing datasets and methodologies.

Prof. Timo Balz, State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS) at the Wuhan University will deliver a lecture on ‘Urban Dynamics – Combining Mobile Social Media Messages and Remote Sensing to Identify Urbanisation Patterns in China’

Prof Balz will share how microwave remote sensing images may be used to identify urban built-up areas and changes within those areas in an objective way, while geocoded mobile social media messages deliver valuable information about human activity and the vitality found in those areas. Four possible cases of land classification are derived by combining the results of both sources into a single raster layer at a 400m cell size. Quantifying these cases in a 2by2 confusion matrix shows positive and negative matches between built-up areas and social media messages, with the correlation of positive matches at 72%.

Including people in traditional remote sensing analysis, a combination of remotely sensed and social media data from the geospatial web (Geoweb) can bring us closer to a more granular analysis of urbanisation processes than is possible from either data source alone.