Uploaded on 2014-10-14 by KaterinaHristovska

[1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14132911238369463.jpg The visible information from this photo is the network and infrastructure of the city. It tells us that this region is quite rich (or at least we have modern buildings) and that this part of the city is connected with many other parts, or even transits that connect the city with the other cities or other parts of the city. This can be viewed from the complexity of the road infrastructure and the mobility of the people. But what we are really interested in, beyond the visible from this picture is the invisible that we can see and how can we use big data to build data-driven cities? The key is that now we have big data from all the people moving around, from things like cellphones, credit cards, and on-line payments, and so on. Our human communication is very complex. Our mobility is also extremely complex. Where do we go? How do we get there? For example, if we get access to people cellphones and track their movement, we can observe the dynamics of the network. We can see how the network evolves and changes. We can look at how can we actually predict mobility. If we track the mobility of the people we can find their daily preferences, their habits, their movements and etc. According to this, we can group these people into clusters with similar preferences and analyse the data. We can surely find some group of people that has a sceptic attitude towards risk, so they don't pay back credit cards very well. This would be something banks and other people might want to know. We may find another group that suffers from diabetes. Sometimes it is all up to the pattern of lifestyle and the habits they have. And this is a huge public health problem. And knowing that we can stratify the population into these different pieces lets us find better health solutions, better financial solutions, and many more. Knowing that lets you then engineer cities that have better transportation infrastructure, that have IT infrastructure to support sharing experiences and ideas among people to make society more creative and more innovative.