UrbComp 2012 - The ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2012)

With the rapid process of urbanization and civilization on earth, urban computing is emerging as a concept where every sensor, device, person, vehicle, building, and street in the urban areas can be used as a component to probe city dynamics and further enable a city-wide computing for serving people and their cities. Here, city dynamics include traffic flows, human mobility, environment, energy consumption, commercial, and economics, etc., in urban areas. Recently, the data representing city dynamics is widely available in the real world, e.g., mobile phone signal, GPS traces of vehicles and people, the ticketing data in public transportation systems, user-generated content (like tweets, micro-blog, check-ins, photos), the data from transportation sensor networks (camera and loop sensors) or environment sensor networks (temperature and air quality), as well as the data from the internet of things. As a result, we are ready for carrying out a real urban computing that leads to better and smarter city. That is, by better sensing and mining city dynamics we are more likely to design effective strategies and intelligent systems for improving urban lives. In addition, urban computing aims to deeply understand the nature and sciences behind the phenomenon occurring in urban spaces.