How Crowdsourcing And Machine Learning Will Change The Way We Design Cities - CITI IO

Researchers at MIT Media Lab are using crowdsourced data to create an algorithm that determines how safe a street looks to the human eye – information that could be used to guide important urban design decisions. In 2011, researchers at the MIT Media Lab debuted Place Pulse, a website that served as a kind of "hot or not" for cities. Given two Google Street View images culled from a select few cities including New York City and Boston, the site asked users to click on the one that seemed safer, more affluent, or more unique. The result was an empirical way to measure urban aesthetics. Now, that data is being used to predict what parts of cities feel the safest.