Urban Analysis for the XXI Century: Using Pervasive Infrastructures for Modeling Urban Dynamics

how cell phone networks could help in the future to modeling urban infrastructures With the increasing capabilities of mobile devices, individuals leave behind footprints of their interaction with the urban environment. As a result, new research areas, such as urban computing and smart cities, focus on improving the quality of life in an urban environment by understanding city dynamics. Traditionally, urban analysis has used data obtained from surveys. However, new data sources (including GPS, Wi-Fi hotspots, geo-tagged social networks, etc.) are becoming more relevant as traditional techniques face important limitations, mainly: (1) the complexity and cost of capturing survey data; (2) the fact that the data is static and represents a snapshot of the situation in a specific moment in time and (3) the increasing unwillingness of individuals to provide (what they perceived to be) personal information. One of the main new data sources relevant for the study of urban environments are cell phone records, as they contain a wide range of human dynamics information (ranging from mobility, to social context and social networks) that can be used to characterize individuals o