# Can multimodal sensing detect and localize transient events?

## TL;DR

This paper explores how multimodal urban sensing data, including physical sensors and social media, can detect and localize transient events like concerts by analyzing anomalies in mobility and social activity patterns.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of combining diverse urban sensor data and social media to detect and localize transient events using statistical outlier detection methods.

## Key findings

- Physical and social sensors reveal spatial impact of events.
- Sensor fusion improves event detection accuracy.
- Different modalities vary in sensitivity to event proximity.

## Abstract

With the increased focus on making cities "smarter", we see an upsurge in investment in sensing technologies embedded in the urban infrastructure. The deployment of GPS sensors aboard taxis and buses, smartcards replacing paper tickets, and other similar initiatives have led to an abundance of data on human mobility, generated at scale and available real-time. Further still, users of social media platforms such as Twitter and LBSNs continue to voluntarily share multimedia content revealing in-situ information on their respective localities. The availability of such longitudinal multimodal data not only allows for both the characterization of the dynamics of the city, but also, in detecting anomalies, resulting from events (e.g., concerts) that disrupt such dynamics, transiently. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of such urban sensor modalities, both physical and social, in detecting a variety of local events of varying intensities (e.g., concerts) using statistical outlier detection techniques. We look at loading levels on arriving bus stops, telecommunication records, and taxi trips, accrued via the public APIs made available through the local transport authorities from Singapore and New York City, and Twitter/Foursquare check-ins collected during the same period, and evaluate against a set of events assimilated from multiple event websites. In particular, we report on our early findings on (1) the spatial impact evident via each modality (i.e., how far from the event venue is the anomaly still present), and (2) the utility in combining decisions from the collection of sensors using rudimentary fusion techniques.