Lecture in Moscow, Russia, August 31, 2016.

1. urban algorithms
Dr. Lev Manovich
Professor | Computer Science | The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Director, Software Studies Lab, California Institute for Telecommunication and
Innovation (Calit2)
August 31, 2016 | Moscow

2. Avant-Garde as Software
Manovich, 1999

3. “The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new
forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the
world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of
accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are
hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image
processing, visualization, simulation.”

4. “The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or
representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing
and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this
respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses
old media as its primary material.”

11. Urban data analytics
2005: Shift from media to data.
New ways of seeing society and
cities using a) data about people
behavior, b) user generated content,
c) computation and algorithms.

13. Four contemporary approaches
to algorithmic data analysis
1) descriptive statistics: compact
summary of data that is smaller than
original data

14. 2) statistical models: mathematical
formulas that connect variables and
predicts some of the data

15. 3) supervised learning: computer
learns to classify new data given a set
of labelled examples

16. 4) unsupervised learning (exploratory
data analysis): exploring a dataset
using algorithms and visualization

17. Mehrdad Yazdani and Lev Manovich. Predicting Social Trends from Non-
photographic Images on Twitter. Big Data and the Humanities workshop,
IEEE 2015 Big Data conference.
We classified 1 million twitter images shared in 20 US cities in 2013 using
Google Deep Learning neural net available to all researchers. The network
classifies images content using 1000 categories. It took less than 2 hours to
classify 1 million images on a single PC with GPU.
The most frequent category turned out to be screenshots.

35. On Broadway interactive installation (2014):
http://on-broadway.nyc/
Daniel Goddemeyer, Moritz Stefaner, Dominikus Baur, Lev Manovich.
We use over 30 million data points and images to represent a single street –
Broadway running through Manhattan (13 miles, 21 km). This representation
combines a number of data layers: Instagram images, Twitter images,
Foursquare check-ins, taxi rides, and selected socio-economic indicators from
US Census.

40. Meta-morphologies of Saint Petersburg
Analysis of 430,000 Instagram photos and 300,000 tweets with
photos shared in the city. Collaboration between SPIN Unit (Kalvo
Damiano Cerrone, Raul Kalvo) and Software Studies Lab (David
Crockett, Lev Manovich). Work in progress.
Follow us: #metaSPB

43. Analysis of content of Instagram images shared in Saint Petersburg using
Google Vision API.

44. Analysis of content of Instagram images shared in Saint-Petersburg using Google
Vision API. Each row shows results for one image. Data processing: Damon Crockett.

45. Examples of user tags assigned to Instagram images shared in Moscow.
From our dataset of 800,000 images shared during 7/2014-8/2015.