With millions of interacting people and hundreds of governing agencies, urban environments are the largest, most dynamic, and most complex macroscopic systems on Earth. The interaction between the three fundamental components of that system (human, natural, and built) can be studied much like any physical system, with observation and application of physical principles to the collection and analysis of that data.
At the “Urban Observatory”, a multi-city facility consisting of a network of observational platforms, a combination of techniques from the domains of astronomy, physics, computer vision, remote sensing, and machine learning are used to address a myriad of questions related to urban science and informatics. Dr. Dobler will demonstrate the power of these techniques when data from the Urban Observatory is fused with publicly available records and in situ sensing data to provide new insights into cities as living organisms that consume energy, have environmental impact, and display characteristic patterns of life, and how that new understanding can be used to improve city functioning and quality of life for its inhabitants.