The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
So far so simple in terms of reading data into the R environment (I’m using the wonderful RStudio by the way). Download a little library, run about 5 lines of code and, boom, my PostgreSQL view is available as a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Someone from ETH Zurich Future Cities Lab showed me a fascinating book by Serge Salat called Cities and Forms (Hermann Editions, Paris, 2011). Haven’t managed to get it (ugh! French Publishers!) but downloaded his paper “Systemic Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: … Continue reading →
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Ollie here in CASA has just posted a new temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, developed by Steven James Gray, again CASA, as part of his PhD. As Ollie…
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There’s a new, temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, which being developed by my colleague Steven James Gray as part of his PhD. For each venue, the collectors count the number […]
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As the athletes have been training for the London 2012 Olympic Games so has been our Twitter Collectors. You may have saw the maps we created from data collected by the very first iteration of the Big Data Toolkit’s Twitter collector which produced some great visualisations. Over the past few weeks I re-wrote some of […]
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Researchers from UCL have analysed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London. Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain…
Continue reading »In 1977, we made a movie about how you build retail spatial interaction models which compute the impacts of new shopping centres on their surroundings. It was made for an Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics (TM281). It was … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Future Internet has published the latest paper as part of the Special Issue Government 2.0 entitled Raising Risk Awareness on the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Decision Making Processes by Marco Prandini and Marco Ramilli of the Università di Bologna: Abstract In the recent past, the so-called “Web 2.0” became a powerful tool for decision making processes. Politicians and […]
Continue reading »The way we get around is changing. We increasingly combine bikes and transit. And in many cities we’re seeing a birth of whole new modes of transport like bike-share and carshare. Over at OpenPlans they build open source tools that are responsive to these changes and let us imagine new ways of moving and with […]
Continue reading »I’ve described this as “radar for trains”, but it now also includes a real-time view of bus and tube delays. The idea is to produce a single visualisation highlighting where there are problems with the transport system: Status of London’s transport system at 13:00 on 8 August 2012. The green squares are bus stops showing …
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The most stupidly named database management system is, sadly, also the system of choice for my research group, the powers that be having apparently no interest in the fact the you can’t pronounce the name, can’t remember how to write … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Go Pro HD Hero is one of the best timelapse cameras out there for 24 hour imagery, its wide angle lens, the ability to power via USB and mount on an outside facing glass window via its suction cup makes it easy to set up and leave. The camera copes well with changes in […]
Continue reading »CASA has a new EU (FP7: Future and Emerging Technologies) project called EUNOIA which is about Evolutive User-centric Networks fOr Intraurban Accessibility. The project will run from October 1st 2012 and is worth 268K Euros. It is part of a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »What have the Olympics got to say about social justice and health inequalities? CrikeyIf the Olympic Games can be used to promote anti-health industries, then why can’t they be used to promote discussions about human rights, social justice a…
Continue reading »What have the Olympics got to say about social justice and health inequalities?Crikey (blog)Lives on the line: Work by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis is depicting child poverty and inequality like a London tube map, where a year in life e…
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On the 4th and 5th August, Portland, OR, was the gathering place for 300 participants that came to the workshop on Public Participation in Scientific Research. The workshop was timed just before the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, and therefore it was not surprising that the workshop focused on citizen science […]
We like this more than we should, the thought of going from ArcScene to a 3D Colour Hologram for public participation in planning seems light years away from the traditional setup: The concept also works via SketchUp and other 3D software, below is a 3D holographic print of Downtown Seattle: Head over to http://www.zebraimaging.com/ to create […]
Continue reading »We have updated our live weather page to work with the iPad/iPhone and other HTML compatible browsers. The page updates every 3 seconds with a live feed from a Davis Vantage Pro 2 on the roof of 1-19 Torrington Place, just off Tottenham Court Road in London. For those with the new iPad we have a […]
Continue reading »The majority of city timelapse movies we have featured are captured from a fixed point. Of course if you are on board a ship and heading into one of the most vibrant cityscapes in the world you can go one step further: Arriving to NY (Enhanced) from H. Caesar on Vimeo. The movie was created […]
Continue reading »The latest in the digital urban tutorial series is available as a downloadable .PDF, it looks at exploring applications for physics engines in urban modelling, the first step of which is a series of techniques to introduce gravity and mass to urban models. We produced a tutorial back in 2009 using ‘Reactor’, Autodesk no longer use this […]
Continue reading »This year I have mostly been mapping country names from data sources found online to ISO3 country codes which are actually useful for something. The continuing proliferation of data sources whose only country indicator is something like “Virgin Is. (UK)” … Continue reading →
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Above is an extract from a map of the London Undergroun […]
Continue reading »Work is starting this week at the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy (CSAP) in Leeds on preparing the Flexible Modelling Framework (FMF) for release under an open source licence. The FMF so far includes the following capabilities: microsimulation (using simulated annealing); spatial interaction modelling and agent-based modelling. The idea behind the framework is to …
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Ok. Well maybe they aren’t. But I recently gave it a good bash at a stand-up comedy routine for UCL’s brightclub. The night is a sort of academic variety night, […]
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Digital Urban is moving from blogger, over the next few hours the domain will point to a new server hosting us on a WordPress system.
Digital Urban 2005
Its been a blast, with over 1900 posts dating from 2005 and 3000+ comments, it equates to rough…
Continue reading »Sometimes a plugin comes along which changes your life. Fast SQL Layer from Pablo T. Carreira is just such a plugin. It allows you to execute arbitrary SQL queries against your underlying database, meaning that views and queries can now … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I’ve managed to get some data onto my PostGIS database, and have got my first visualisation result. Since the aid dataset is large (c. 1,000,000, source: aiddata.org, the dataset is called ‘aid data 2 short’) I’ve summed over donors and … Continue reading →
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We are working on a new look at digitalurban, at the moment its very much in its beta phase with the move away from blogger and into wordpress. The move allows us to set up a range of new features and portfolio type pages, for example if you click on…
Continue reading »We have a new look at digitalurban, at the moment its very much in its beta phase with the move away from blogger and into wordpress. The move allows us to set up a range of new features and portfolio type pages, for example if you click on ‘tutorials’ or any of the scrolling images […]
Continue reading »The day is upon us! Yes, today we announce the results of The Science Songwriter of the Future! competition that we’ve been running over the summer. And those right there are the medals – lovingly crafted by Lynn at Tuck … Continue reading →
In the big, fat dataset I’m using to study what affects the global flow of development aid, I’ve come across a problem which researchers must have dealt with a million times from scratch, and never published the results of how … Continue reading →
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The A-Z is probably the most famous London Atlas – […]
Continue reading »This was something I came across while trying to calculate expected waiting times for tubes and buses. I’ve collected several months’ worth of transport data and wanted to calculate the mean and variance of waiting times at every station and platform. This can be achieved in a few hours for the tube, but there are … Read more →
Continue reading »The London Olympic Games organisers called on Londoners to get ahead of the Games and it looks like they have.See it on Scoop.it, via Spatial Analysis
Continue reading »Study shows travel habits have changed for GamesBBC NewsWe've been working with UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis to try to find out what's happening to commuters during the Games. They've been using GPS to track four commuters. Obvi…
Continue reading »Study shows travel habits have changed for GamesBBC NewsWe've been working with UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis to try to find out what's happening to commuters during the Games. They've been using GPS to track four commuters. Obvi…
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I recently attended the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) 5th Research Methods Festival. Researchers from the Talisman project presented in a few different sessions, presenting cutting edge work on methods for collecting data (with a focus on new crowd-sourced data) as well as methods for spatial modelling, simulation and policy analysis. All of the … Read more →
Continue reading »Atlantic cities features the maping london blog.See it on Scoop.it, via Spatial Analysis
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The Atlantic CitiesThe Coolest New Maps of LondonThe Atlantic CitiesThe site, run by Ollie O'Brien and James Cheshire of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, has posted some 80 London maps over the past year and a …
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The Atlantic CitiesThe Coolest New Maps of LondonThe Atlantic CitiesThe site, run by Ollie O'Brien and James Cheshire of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, has posted some 80 London maps over the past year and a …
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