Abstract

The site urbangems.org crowdsources visual perceptions of quiet, beauty and happiness across the city using Google Street View pictures. The aim is to identify the visual cues that are generally associated with concepts difficult to define such beauty, happiness, quietness, or even deprivation [1,2]. The site has been awarded the A.T. Kearney Prize, and it has resulted in a couple of Flickr applications.

[1] Project aims to crowdsource what makes a happy city http://bbc.in/15WMnI9

[2] Aesthetic Capital: What Makes London Look Beautiful, Quiet, and Happy? CSCW 2014 http://bit.ly/19NTEr6

Bio: Daniele Quercia is a social media researcher at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona. Before that, he was a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. He is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds and his work has been focusing in the areas of data mining, computational social science, and urban informatics. His research has been published in leading venues including ICSE , Ubicomp, ICDM , CSCW, RecSys, WSDM , and WWW , received honorable mentions from AAAI ICWSM , and has been featured on La Repubblica, The Independent, New Scientist, Le Monde, and BBC . He was Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked on social networks in a city context, and his PhD thesis at UC London was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science. During his PhD, he was a Microsoft Research PhD Scholar and MBA Technology Fellow of London Business School, and he also interned at the National Research Council in Barcelona and at National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo. He studied at Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and University of Illinois (USA).