Urbanization's rapid progress has modernized many people's lives but also engendered big issues, such as traffic congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing aims to tackle these issues by using the data that has been generated in cities (e.g., traffic flow, human mobility, and geographical data). Urban computing connects urban sensing, data management, data analytics, and service providing into a recurrent process for an unobtrusive and continuous improvement of people's lives, city operation systems, and the environment. Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field where computer sciences meet conventional city-related fields, like transportation, civil engineering, environment, economy, ecology, and sociology in the context of urban spaces. This article first introduces the concept of urban computing, discussing its general framework and key challenges from the perspective of computer sciences. Second, we classify the applications of urban computing into seven categories, consisting of urban planning, transportation, the environment, energy, social, economy, and public safety and security, presenting representative scenarios in each category. Third, we summarize the typical technologies that are needed in urban computing into four folds, which are about urban sensing, urban data management, knowledge fusion across heterogeneous data, and urban data visualization. Finally, we give an outlook on the future of urban computing, suggesting a few research topics that are somehow missing in the community.

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Urban Computing: Concepts, Methodologies, and Applications

This paper tackles a major privacy concern in current location-based services where users have to continuously report their locations to the database server in order to obtain the service. For example, a user asking about the nearest gas station has to report her exact location. With untrusted servers, reporting the location information may lead to several privacy threats. In this paper, we present Casper1; a new framework in which mobile and stationary users can entertain location-based services without revealing their location information. Casper consists of two main components, the location anonymizer and the privacy-aware query processor. The location anonymizer blurs the users' exact location information into cloaked spatial regions based on user-specified privacy requirements. The privacy-aware query processor is embedded inside the location-based database server in order to deal with the cloaked spatial areas rather than the exact location information. Experimental results show that Casper achieves high quality location-based services while providing anonymity for both data and queries.

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The new Casper: query processing for location services without compromising privacy

GPS-equipped taxis can be regarded as mobile sensors probing traffic flows on road surfaces, and taxi drivers are usually experienced in finding the fastest (quickest) route to a destination based on their knowledge. In this paper, we mine smart driving directions from the historical GPS trajectories of a large number of taxis, and provide a user with the practically fastest route to a given destination at a given departure time. In our approach, we propose a time-dependent landmark graph, where a node (landmark) is a road segment frequently traversed by taxis, to model the intelligence of taxi drivers and the properties of dynamic road networks. Then, a Variance-Entropy-Based Clustering approach is devised to estimate the distribution of travel time between two landmarks in different time slots. Based on this graph, we design a two-stage routing algorithm to compute the practically fastest route. We build our system based on a real-world trajectory dataset generated by over 33,000 taxis in a period of 3 months, and evaluate the system by conducting both synthetic experiments and in-the-field evaluations. As a result, 60-70% of the routes suggested by our method are faster than the competing methods, and 20% of the routes share the same results. On average, 50% of our routes are at least 20% faster than the competing approaches.

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T-drive: driving directions based on taxi trajectories

This paper presents a Cloud-based system computing customized and practically fast driving routes for an end user using (historical and real-time) traffic conditions and driver behavior. In this system, GPS-equipped taxicabs are employed as mobile sensors constantly probing the traffic rhythm of a city and taxi drivers' intelligence in choosing driving directions in the physical world. Meanwhile, a Cloud aggregates and mines the information from these taxis and other sources from the Internet, like Web maps and weather forecast. The Cloud builds a model incorporating day of the week, time of day, weather conditions, and individual driving strategies (both of the taxi drivers and of the end user for whom the route is being computed). Using this model, our system predicts the traffic conditions of a future time (when the computed route is actually driven) and performs a self-adaptive driving direction service for a particular user. This service gradually learns a user's driving behavior from the user's GPS logs and customizes the fastest route for the user with the help of the Cloud. We evaluate our service using a real-world dataset generated by over 33,000 taxis over a period of 3 months in Beijing. As a result, our service accurately estimates the travel time of a route for a user; hence finding the fastest route customized for the user.

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Driving with knowledge from the physical world

Rapid urbanization creates new challenges and issues, and the smart city concept offers opportunities to rise to these challenges, solve urban problems and provide citizens with a better living environment. This paper presents an exhaustive literature survey of smart cities. First, it introduces the origin and main issues facing the smart city concept, and then presents the fundamentals of a smart city by analyzing its definition and application domains. Second, a data-centric view of smart city architectures and key enabling technologies is provided. Finally, a survey of recent smart city research is presented. This paper provides a reference to researchers who intend to contribute to smart city research and implementation.

A literature survey on smart cities

This paper proposes and solves the Time-Interval All Fastest Path (allFP) query. Given a user-defined leaving or arrival time interval I, a source node s and an end node e, allFP asks for a set of all fastest paths from s to e, one for each sub-interval of I. Note that the query algorithm should find a partitioning of I into sub-intervals. Existing methods can only be used to solve a very special case of the problem, when the leaving time is a single time instant. A straightforward solution to the allFP query is to run existing methods many times, once for every time instant in I. This paper proposes a solution based on novel extensions to the A* algorithm. Instead of expanding the network many times, we expand once. The travel time on a path is kept as a function of leaving time. Methods to combine travel-time functions are provided to expand a path. A novel lower-bound estimator for travel time is proposed. Performance results reveal that our method is more efficient and more accurate than the discrete-time approach.

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Finding Fastest Paths on A Road Network with Speed Patterns

We propose and solve the optimal-location query in spatial databases. Given a set S of sites, a set O of weighted objects, and a spatial region Q, the optimal-location query returns a location in Q with maximum influence. Here the influence of a location l is the total weight of its RNNs, i.e. the total weight of objects in O that are closer to l than to any site in S. This new query has practical applications, but is very challenging to solve. Existing work on computing RNNs assumes a single query location, and thus cannot be used to compute optimal locations. The reason is that there are infinite candidate locations in Q. If we check a finite set of candidate locations, the result can be inaccurate, i.e. the revealed location may not have maximum influence. This paper proposes three methods that accurately compute optimal locations. The first method uses a standard R*-tree. To compute an optimal location, the method retrieves certain objects from the R*-tree and sends them as a stream to a plane-sweep algorithm, which uses a new data structure called the aSB-tree to ensure query efficiency. The second method is based on a new index structure called the OL-tree, which novelly extends the k-d-B-tree to store segmented rectangular records. The OL-tree is only of theoretical usage for it is not space efficient. The most practical approach is based on a new index structure called the Virtual OL-tree. These methods are theoretically and experimentally evaluated.

http://zgking.com:8080/home/donghui/publications/ol.pdf

The optimal-location query

This paper proposes and solves the min-dist optimal-location query in spatial databases. Given a set S of sites, a set O of weighted objects, and a spatial region Q, the min-dist optimal-location query returns a location in Q which, if a new site is built there, minimizes the average distance from each object to its closest site. This query can help a franchise (e.g. McDonald's) decide where to put a new store in order to maximize the benefit to its customers. To solve this problem is challenging, for there are theoretically infinite number of locations in Q, all of which could be candidates. This paper first provides a theorem that limits the number of candidate locations without losing the power to find exact answers. Then it provides a progressive algorithm that quickly suggests a location, tells the maximum error it may have, and keeps refining the result. When the algorithm finishes, the exact answer can be found. The intermediate result of early runs can be used to prune the search space for later runs. Crucial to the pruning technique are novel lower-bound estimators. The proposed algorithm, the effect of several optimizations, and the progressiveness are experimentally evaluated.

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Progressive computation of the min-dist optimal-location query

Given a set O of weighted objects, a set S of sites, and a query site s, the bichromatic RNN query computes the influence set of s, or the set of objects in O that consider s as the nearest site among all sites in S. The influence of a site s can be defined as the total weight of its RNNs. This paper addresses the new and interesting problem of finding the top-t most influential sites from S, inside a given spatial region Q. A straightforward approach is to find the sites in Q, and compute the RNNs of every such site. This approach is not efficient for two reasons. First, all sites in Q need to be identified whatsoever, and the number may be large. Second, both the site R-tree and the object R-tree need to be browsed a large number of times. For each site in Q, the R-tree of sites is browsed to identify the influence region -- a polygonal region that may contain RNNs, and then the R-tree of objects is browsed to find the RNN set. This paper proposes an algorithm called TopInfluential-Sites, which finds the top-t most influential sites by browsing both trees once systematically. Novel pruning techniques are provided, based on a new metric called minExistDNN. There is no need to compute the influence for all sites in Q, or even to visit all sites in Q. Experimental results verify that our proposed method outperforms the straightforward approach.

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On computing top- t most influential spatial sites

This paper presents a novel algorithm for Incremental and General Evaluation of continuous Reverse Nearest neighbor queries (IGERN, for short). The IGERN algorithm is general as it is applicable for both the monochromatic and bichromatic reverse nearest neighbor queries. The incremental aspect of IGERN is achieved through determining only a small set of objects to be monitored. While previous algorithms for monochromatic queries rely mainly on monitoring six pie regions, IGERN takes a radical approach by monitoring only a single region around the query object. The IGERN algorithm clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in monochromatic queries. In addition, the IGERN algorithm presents the first attempt for continuous evaluation of bichromatic reverse nearest neighbor queries. The computational complexity of IGERN is presented in comparison to the state-of-the-art algorithms in the monochromatic case and to the use of Voronoi diagrams for the bichromatic case. In addition, the correctness of IGERN in both the monochromatic and bichromatic cases are proved. Extensive experimental analysis shows that IGERN is efficient, is scalable, and outperforms previous techniques for continuous reverse nearest neighbor queries.

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Tian Xia

Papers

Finding Fastest Paths on A Road Network with Speed Patterns

The optimal-location query

Progressive computation of the min-dist optimal-location query

On computing top- t most influential spatial sites

Continuous Evaluation of Monochromatic and Bichromatic Reverse Nearest Neighbors