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This book introduces the latest thinking on the use of Big Data in the context of urban systems, including research and insights on human behavior, urban dynamics, resource use, sustainability and spatial disparities, where it promises improved planning, management and governance in the urban sectors (e.g., transportation, energy, smart cities, crime, housing, urban and regional economies, public health, public engagement, urban governance and political systems), as well as Big Data´s utility in decision-making, and development of indicators to monitor economic and social activity, and for urban sustainability, transparency, livability, social inclusion, place-making, accessibility and resilience.

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Introduction to Seeing Cities Through Big Data - Research, Methods, and Applications in Urban Informatics.- Big Data and Urban Informatics: Innovations and Challenges to Urban Planning and Knowledge Discovery.- Analytics of user-generated content.- Using User-Generated Content to Understand Cities.- Developing an Interactive Mobile Volunteered Geographic Information Platform to Integrate Environmental Big Data and Citizen Science in Urban Management.- CyberGIS-enabled Urban Sensing from Volunteered Citizen Participation Using Mobile Devices.- Challenges and opportunities of urban Big Data.- The Potential for Big Data to Improve Neighborhood-Level Census Data.- Big Data and Survey Research: Supplement or Substitute?.- Big Spatio-temporal Network Data Analytics for Smart Cities: Research Needs.- A review of heteroscedasticity treatment with Gaussian Processes and Quantile Regression meta-models.- Changing organizational and educational perspectives with urban Big Data.- Urban Informatics: Critical Data and Technology Considerations.- Emerging Urban Digital Infomediaries and Civic Hacking in an Era of Big Data and Open Data Initiatives.- How Should Urban Planners Be Trained to Handle Big Data?.- Energy Planning in Big data Era: A Theme Study of the Residential Sector.- Urban data management.- Using an online spatial analytics workbench for understanding housing affordability in Sydney.- A Big Data Mashing Tool for Measuring Transit System Performance.- Developing a Comprehensive U.S. Transit Accessibility Database.- Seeing Chinese Cities through Big Data and Statistics.- Urban knowledge discovery applied to different urban contexts.- Planning for the Change: Mapping Sea Level Rise and Storm Inundation in Sherman Island Using 3Di Hydrodynamic Model and LiDAR.- The Impact of Land-Use Variables on Free-floating Carsharing Vehicle Rental Choice and Parking Duration.- Dynamic Agent Based Simulation of an Urban Disaster Using Synthetic Big Data.- Estimation of Urban Transport Accessibility at the Spatial Resolution of an Individual Traveler.- Modeling Taxi Demand and Supply in New York City Using Large-Scale Taxi GPS Data.- Detecting stop episodes from GPS trajectories with gaps.- Emergencies and Crisis.- Using Social Media and Satellite Data for Damage Assessment in Urban Areas During Emergencies.- Health and well-being.- ´Big Data´: Pedestrian Volume Using Google Street View Images.- Learning from Outdoor Webcams: Surveillance of Physical Activity Across Environments.- Mapping Urban Soundscapes via Citygram.- Social equity and data democracy.- Big Data and Smart (Equitable) Cities.- Big Data, Small Apps: Premises and Products of the Civic Hackathon.

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"This book is a reviewed collection of papers presented in 2014 at a workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago. ... each chapter contains an abstract, appropriate figures, illustrations, graphs, and a list of references ... . readers will find an excellent introduction to contemporary research and practice in urban informatics." (Brad Reid, Computing Reviews, June, 2017)

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