Urban computing: enabling urban intelligence with big data

Urban computing is a process of acquisition, integration and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings and humans, to tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g., air pollution, energy consumption and traffic congestion. Urban computing connects unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management and analytics models, and novel visualization methods, to create win-win-win solutions that improve urban environment, human life quality, and city operation systems. Urban computing also helps us understand the nature of urban phenomena and even predict the future of cities. Urban computing is an interdisciplinary field fusing computer science and information technology with traditional city-related fields, like urban planning, transportation, civil engineering, economy, ecology, and sociology, in the context of urban spaces [1].1) Figure 1 presents a general framework of urban computing which is comprised of four layers: urban sensing, urban data management, urban data analytics, and service providing. The following paragraphs discuss main challenges of each layer and key techniques needed.