On March 10, 2017 we hosted a seminar by Daniele Quercia in the Como Campus of Politecnico di Milano, on the topic:
Good City Life
Daniele Quercia leads the Social Dynamics group at Bell Labs in Cambridge
(UK). He has been named one of Fortune magazine’s 2014 Data All-Stars, and spoke about “happy maps” at TED. His research has been focusing in the area of urban informatics and received best paper awards from Ubicomp 2014 and from ICWSM 2015, and an honourable mention from ICWSM 2013. He was Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, a Horizon senior researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at the department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He received his PhD from UC London. His thesis was sponsored by Microsoft Research and was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.
His presentation will contrast the corporate smart-city rhetoric about efficiency, predictability, and security with a different perspective on the cities, which I think is very inspiring and visionary.
“You’ll get to work on time; no queue when you go shopping, and you are safe because of CCTV cameras around you”. Well, all these things make a city acceptable, but they don’t make a city great.
Daniele is launching goodcitylife.org – a global group of like-minded people who are passionate about building technologies whose focus is not necessarily to create a smart city but to give a good life to city dwellers. The future of the city is, first and foremost, about people, and those people are increasingly networked. We will see how a creative use of network-generated data can tackle hitherto unanswered research questions. Can we rethink existing mapping tools [happy-maps]? Is it possible to capture smellscapes of entire cities and celebrate good odors [smelly-maps]? And soundscapes [chatty-maps]?
The complete video of the seminar has been streamed live on youtube and is now available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0IprrZ7phc&w=560&h=315 and embedded here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0IprrZ7phc&w=560&h=315]
The seminar was open to the public and hosted at the Polo Regionale di Como headquarters of Politecnico di Milano, located in Via Anzani 42, III floor, Como.
You can also download the Good City Life flyer.
