Correlating Pedestrian Flows and Search Engine Queries
This addresses the challenge of location characterization for ubiquitous computing applications, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing correlation method to new data types.
The researchers tackled the problem of characterizing urban locations by correlating pedestrian flows with Google search queries, showing that pedestrian flows at specific locations can be correlated with the frequency of semantically relevant search terms.
An important challenge for ubiquitous computing is the development of techniques that can characterize a location vis-a-vis the richness and diversity of urban settings. In this paper we report our work on correlating urban pedestrian flows with Google search queries. Using longitudinal data we show pedestrian flows at particular locations can be correlated with the frequency of Google search terms that are semantically relevant to those locations. Our approach can identify relevant content, media, and advertisements for particular locations.