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Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture…
Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method…
How to assess the potential of liking a city or a neighborhood before ever having been there. The concept of urban quality has until now pertained to global city ranking, where cities are evaluated under a grid of given parameters, or…
The evolution of clothing styles and their migration across the world is intriguing, yet difficult to describe quantitatively. We propose to discover and quantify fashion influences from everyday images of people wearing clothes. We…
We propose a quantitative method to classify cities according to their street pattern. We use the conditional probability distribution of shape factor of blocks with a given area, and define what could constitute the `fingerprint' of a…
The world is witnessing a period of extreme growth and urbanization; cities in the 21st century became nerve centers creating economic opportunities and cultural values which make cities grow exponentially. With this rapid urban population…
Scientific studies of society increasingly rely on digital traces produced by various aspects of human activity. In this paper, we use a relatively unexplored source of data, anonymized records of bank card transactions collected in Spain…
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of…
We study centrality in urban street patterns of different world cities represented as networks in geographical space. The results indicate that a spatial analysis based on a set of four centrality indices allows an extended visualization…
Marathons are now common ways of seeing cities, yet little is known about how representative their routes are. Using 311 marathon routes across five continents, we compare landmarks and amenities along the course with those elsewhere in the…
The methods presented in this paper allow for a statistical analysis revealing centers of excellence around the world using programs that are freely available. Based on Web of Science data, field-specific excellence can be identified in…
We identify "values" as actions that classifiers take that speak to open questions of significant social concern. Investigating a classifier's values builds on studies of social bias that uncover how classifiers participate in social…
Understanding people's preferences is crucial for urban planning, yet current approaches often combine responses from multi-cultural populations, obscuring demographic differences and risking amplifying biases. We conducted a largescale…
Life quality in cities is deeply related to the mobility options, and how easily one can access different services and attractions. The pedestrian infrastructure network provides the backbone for social life in cities. While there are many…
Designing socially active streets has long been a goal of urban planning, yet existing quantitative research largely measures pedestrian volume rather than the quality of social interactions. We hypothesize that street view imagery -- an…
The evolution of clothing styles and their migration across the world is intriguing, yet difficult to describe quantitatively. We propose to discover and quantify fashion influences from catalog and social media photos. We explore fashion…
Names are deeply tied to human identity. They can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. However, using names as a core indicator of identity can lead to over-simplification of complex identities. When…
Many approaches have dealt with the hypothesis that the environment contain information, mostly focusing on how humans decode information from the environment in visual perception, navigation, and spatial decision-making. A question yet to…
Computer vision methods that quantify the perception of urban environment are increasingly being used to study the relationship between a city's physical appearance and the behavior and health of its residents. Yet, the throughput of…
Smell has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, smell has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. One of the authors…