Curating Transient Population in Urban Dynamics System

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Curating Transient Population in Urban Dynamics System Gautam S. Thakur, Kevin A. Sparks, Robert N. Stewart, Marie L. Urban, Budhendra L. Bhaduri The Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) Group Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1 Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37831 USA Email: {thakurg, sparksa, stewartrn, urbanml, bhaduribl}@ornl.gov Abstract Research efforts in population modelling has proven its efficacy in understanding the basic information about residential and commercial areas, as well as for the purposes of planning, development and improvement of the community as an eco-system. Limited by our current ability to capture the dynamics of population change at a finer resolution of space and time, more or less, such efforts assume static nature of population. Today, more and more people are becoming mobile, traveling across borders impacting the nuts and bolts of our urban fabric. Unfortunately, our current efforts are being surpassed by the need to capture such transient population. It is becoming imperative to identify and define them, as well as measure their dynamics and interconnectedness. In this work, we intend to research urban population mobility patterns, gauge their transient nature, and extend our knowledge of their visited locations. We plan to achieve this by designing and developing novel methods and using VGI data that models and characterizes transient population dynamics. 1. Introduction Over the last decade, worldwide percentages of transient population i.e. population on-the- move have grown linearly, on account of socio-economic development and rising global conflicts (Worldbank 2016). Characterizing such movement patterns are vital to understand the dynamics of an urban system. Beyond that, privacy-preserved and discrete insight into the diurnal activities of people, where they are, where they go, and how much time they spent at certain locations is vital for first responders in times of emergencies, and for urban planners to develop robust future cities. Traditionally, approaches involved in curating such information have heavily relied on census data, surveys, and simulations models. While they provide an excellent source of baseline statistics - for logistical purposes, they rarely collect the spatio-temporal distribution relating to the dynamics of population movements. Furthermore, they omit non-residential locations, such as business districts, parks, and museums. Social media(Hawelka et al. 2014; Frias-Martinez et al. 2012), cellular data(Di Lorenzo & Calabrese 2011; Calabrese et al. 2010; Calabrese et al. 2011; Calabrese et al. 2013; Isaacman et al. 2012) have proved their efficacies in representing global patterns of human mobility. However, much of the current research has not focused on curating population distribution on a temporal scale (e.g. Census data focuses on residential or night time population). This work attempts to provide a set of guidelines that help infer the change in population numbers at different temporal scales. In this work, first we propose Transient Population Dynamics Model that attempts to describe and model the mobility patterns of active population. In addition, it provides approaches to identify and estimate transient population and aid in discovering new locations and the duration of their visits. Second, we utilize this model in estimating the transient population across Australia and compare the differences against respective census data. Also, we intend to discover frequently visited locations in outback and metropolitan areas. We believe this work will generate enthusiasm among researchers and make a case for the importance of curating transient population.