Allen Yilun Lin

Runsheng Xu, Shibo Zhang, Yue Zhao et al.

Recent research has found that navigation systems usually assume that all roads are equally safe, directing drivers to dangerous routes, which led to catastrophic consequences. To address this problem, this paper aims to begin the process of adding road safety awareness to navigation systems. To do so, we first created a definition for road safety that navigation systems can easily understand by adapting well-established safety standards from transportation studies. Based on this road safety definition, we then developed a machine learning-based road safety classifier that predicts the safety level for road segments using a diverse feature set constructed only from large-scale publicly available geographic data. Evaluations in four different countries show that our road safety classifier achieves satisfactory performance. Finally, we discuss the factors to consider when extending our road safety classifier to other regions and potential new safety designs enabled by our road safety predictions.

Isaac Johnson, Allen Yilun Lin, Toby Jia-Jun Li et al.

Wikipedia articles about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the peer production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that in both Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, peer-produced content about rural areas is of systematically lower quality, is less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and is more likely to have been generated by automated software agents (i.e. bots). We then codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural phenomena through peer production and discuss potential solutions.

Ashley Colley, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Allen Yilun Lin et al.

The widespread popularity of Pokémon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokémon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokémon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokémon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokémon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokémon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokémon GO may be counteracted.