Bulletin No. 1, 2021

THE NEW GOSPEL ACCORDING TO A.I. 7 Prof. Sylvia He Department of Geography and Resource Management Luo Shuli PhD candidate, Department of Geography and Resource Management In the US, social media data has been used to detect incidents in public transport systems. AI can help analyze and verify incident reports on social media, based on which operators can make responses and alert passengers ‘A recent trend in urban planning is to complement conventional surveys with big data,’ said Prof. Sylvia He , Shuli’s advisor and co-author of the prize-winning paper. While allowing for more comprehensive social demographics to be collected and for customization, surveys are costly and can only be conducted infrequently. Meanwhile, a city-wide Internet of Things (IoT)—made possible by the explosion of smart phones, GPS-enabled vehicles and, of course, social media users in recent years—provides a steady, voluminous stream of data capable of revealing a great deal about the population’s travel behaviour. ‘A hallmark of smart cities is the widespread use of energy-efficient, zero-emissions electric vehicles, and to promote e-mobility, we need more charging stations. But where should we build them? This is where big data can fill us in,’ Professor He explained, giving another example of how big data is used in urban planning. Whereas normally researchers would have to depend on surveys, Professor He’s team is now exploring a method of using raw data from existing stations to find out where, when and for how long electric vehicles are more likely to be serviced, thereby ensuring a more reasonable distribution of charging facilities across the city. As many insights as it may contain, though, there is no way we mere mortals can sift through such a massive amount of data. We need a program that, having been taught the rules, automates the task. Better yet, we can have an AI program, which can figure out the rules without needing us to write them out for it. Indeed, when it comes to social media posts, which are often rife with typos, shorthands and other irregularities like the tweet we have seen at the outset, AI is the clear winner in that it spares us fromhaving to teach the program to recognize the numerous special