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Special:Flexbar I

The Visible City

Visible Amsterdam: the real-time city is now real!

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What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane?
Not simply buildings and squares, but also the aggregation of people who populate it, outdoor as well as indoor. We could detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are most crowded, reconstruct commuting patterns during the day. All sorts of new services for the public good would be enabled, from emergency planning to traffic management, from the efficient allocation of utilities to impact assessment of new city infrastructures.

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    Real-time visualization of cell phone traffic in the City of Amsterdam, on the KPN network

with:

We made the visible city real, by leveraging those location data that our mobile phones generate over the course of the day. We made them anonymous, aggregated and processed through innovative algorithms. Without impinging on the privacy of individual subscribers to the network, our visualizations return important information on agglomeration and relative weights of human activities in the urban environment.
In this special, we’ll discuss the visible city, illustrate examples from cities like Rome, New York and Copenhagen and launch Visible Amsterdam, a project in collaboration with KPN and the Dutch Ministry of Transportation. Leveraging on the world-class research and reputation of, among others, the Senseable City Lab at MIT Boston, we will present an international initiative to make the visible city real and enable all sorts of public good applications on the top of it.

Event will be held at Flexbar I.
Contact Euro Beinat

PROGRAM

Carlo Ratti - Director Senseable City Lab of MIT Boston
THE VISIBLE CITY AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Through the review of a range of projects, such as Real-Time Rome and New York Talk Exchange, Carlo Ratti elaborates on the applications of the visible city, of sensor-based urban development and of wikicities.

Euro Beinat - Director Sensible Future Foundation & University of Salzburg
VISIBLE AMSTERDAM
This presentation will launch Visible Amsterdam: the city in real time as seen from the interpretation of mobile phone activity of the KPN network. Euro Beinat will show real-time people flows and patterns in Amsterdam, as well as the city behavior in normal days and during special events. He will discuss uses of this information for mobility, safety and city management.

Lorenzo de Rita - Founder and Chief Scientist of The Soon Institute
COMMUNICATION AND VISIBILITY
Lorenzo, a seasoned communication guru, derives from his experience in advertisement and media the implications of the visible city for communication, media and advertisement. He looks at experiments in communication that can either build upon urban visibility but also use it for profiling the city.

Bart Schermer - Partner Considerati & University of Leiden
PRIVACY AND VISIBILITY IN THE SENSOR SOCIETY
How does extreme visibility meet our legitimate demands for privacy and the right "to be left alone"?. Bart Schermer reviews the visible city from the point of view of privacy and freedom, and provides us with tools and concepts to positively address the increasingly tangled relationship between technology innovation and the individual sphere.

Event closes with social activity.