urban algorithmsDr. Lev Manovich Professor | Computer Science | The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkDirector, Software Studies Lab, California Institute for Telecommunication and Innovation (Calit2)

August 31, 2016 | Moscow

Avant-Garde as SoftwareManovich, 1999

“The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, simulation.”

“The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.”

Urban data analytics2005: Shift from media to data.New ways of seeing society and cities using a) data about people behavior, b) user generated content, c) computation and algorithms.

Four contemporary approaches to algorithmic data analysis

1) descriptive statistics: compact summary of data that is smaller than original data

2) statistical models: mathematical formulas that connect variables and predicts some of the data

3) supervised learning: computer learns to classify new data given a set of labelled examples

4) unsupervised learning (exploratory data analysis): exploring a dataset using algorithms and visualization

Mehrdad Yazdani and Lev Manovich. Predicting Social Trends from Non-photographic Images on Twitter. Big Data and the Humanities workshop, IEEE 2015 Big Data conference.

We classified 1 million twitter images shared in 20 US cities in 2013 using Google Deep Learning neural net available to all researchers. The network classifies images content using 1000 categories. It took less than 2 hours to classify 1 million images on a single PC with GPU.

The most frequent category turned out to be screenshots.

On Broadway interactive installation (2014):http://on-broadway.nyc/

Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, Lev Manovich.

We use over 30 million data points and images to represent a single street – Broadway running through Manhattan (13 miles, 21 km). This representation combines a number of data layers: Instagram images, Twitter images, Foursquare check-ins, taxi rides, and selected socio-economic indicators from US Census.

Meta-morphologies of Saint Petersburg

Analysis of 430,000 Instagram photos and 300,000 tweets with photos shared in the city. Collaboration between SPIN Unit (Kalvo Damiano Cerrone, Raul Kalvo) and Software Studies Lab (David Crockett, Lev Manovich). Work in progress.

Follow us: #metaSPB

Analysis of content of Instagram images shared in Saint Petersburg using Google Vision API.

Analysis of content of Instagram images shared in Saint-Petersburg using Google Vision API. Each row shows results for one image. Data processing: Damon Crockett.

Examples of user tags assigned to Instagram images shared in Moscow. From our dataset of 800,000 images shared during 7/2014-8/2015.