On the Comparison of the Social Dynamic of Large Cities through Participatory Sensing

The dynamics of cities have been studied over the years with various applications such as urban planning, disease propagation, traffic forecasting, local recommendations and studies of human social behavior. However, with the technological evolution, especially the popularization of smartphones and the Internet, a new opportunity is presented to carry out such studies: the use of social media data for the population study. In this context, this paper aims to present a new way to compare cities, using as similarity measure of the pattern of social mobility of its inhabitants. To validate the study, 1,601,323 Foursquare check-ins were used spread over 10 cities in a period of 33 days. © 2003-2012 IEEE.