CityBeat

Abstract

With the increasing volume of location-annotated content from various social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare, we now have real-time access to people's daily documentation of local activities, interests and attention. In this demo paper, we present CityBeat, a real-time visualization of hyper-local social media content for cities. The main objective of CityBeat is to provide users -- with a specific focus on journalists -- with information about the city's ongoings, and alert them to unusual activities. The system collects a stream of geo-tagged photos as input, uses time series analysis and classification techniques to detect hyper-local events, and compute trends and statistics. The demo includes a visualization of this information that is designed to be installed on a large-screen in a newsroom, as an ambient display.