Instagram posts can help with urban planning
Researchers at the University of Missouri are using AI to infer location-specific emotional states from Instagram posts. This could have a significant impact on future urban planning.
According to Jayedi Aman from the University of Missouri the future design of cities will be driven as much by human experience as by actual materials. Together with his colleague Tim Matisziw, he has used artificial intelligence (AI) to research the emotional side of city life - in particular the connection between the physical characteristics of a city and how people feel in this environment.
Insta with location tags
Based on public Instagram posts with location tags, the experts developed an AI tool to recognize the emotional coloring of the images and texts. The tool recognized whether people were happy, frustrated or relaxed.
Google Street View and another AI tool were then used to analyze what these places actually looked like and these characteristics were linked to how users felt at the time of their posts.
Digital "emotional map"
Aman and Matisziw have used this to create a digital "emotional map". It shows how people feel in a city. In the next step, they want to create a digital version of a city based on the information they have collected, an "urban digital twin".
The twin can then display users' feelings in real time. The scientists are confident that this type of emotional mapping will provide a powerful new tool for modern urban planning.
For example, if a park receives a lot of happy posts, it can be investigated why this is the case. The tool could also be used to identify areas where people do not feel safe and react accordingly.
Aman envisions a future in which data on people's feelings becomes a centerpiece of city dashboards. The current research results are available in Frontiers in Computer Science to read. (pte)
