Urban living in the age of the smart city

In a commentary, fourth-year PhD candidate Kasthuri Jayarajah and Professor Archan Misra, who is also the Associate Dean of Research from SMU School of Information Systems said that university-led initiatives such as the LiveLabs Urban Lifestyle Innovation Platform at SMU have developed mobile computing technologies to understand behavioural traits of individuals via their smartphones and wearable devices such as smartwatches. In a recent study analysing a set of advertised events that were held in and around the Central Business District, it was found that an event’s venue could be located with less than a kilometre error in more than 40 per cent of the cases, relying solely on crowd estimation using aggregated, anonymised records of consumer phone calls, SMSes and data usage. An ongoing project, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cambridge, explores the use of data from location-based social networks, along with urban transportation data that helps profile the commuters coming and going from different neighbourhoods, to predict the health of individual retail businesses.