What Can Cities be Like When Everything Talks

In recent years, we've seen our cities increasingly covered with networked computational devices. Mobile phones, micro-controllers in our cars, distributed sensors, or the large infrastructures that service our cities - all leave digital traces. These can help us gain a new understanding of dynamic phenomena that happen in place, and in real-time. We can ask questions about energy availability, air quality, traffic conditions, social interaction, and many others. When we put this information back in the city, it can help users make more informed decisions about anything from mobility to allocation and consumption of resources, or rapid emergency response. In this talk, Assaf Biderman will take us through some of the research work carried out at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, which aims at exploring how this new condition could impact future life in cities.