AI Is Reshaping What We Know About Cities

Why do certain neighborhoods feel safe while some feel dangerous? Why are others considered beautiful? How do cities develop and change over time? And most importantly, how can we quantify these observations about the way we perceive cities, and use it to plan urban areas that are more equitable? César Hidalgo, the director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab, has spent years using crowdsourced data and machine vision technology to build models of cities that can answer questions that statistics and surveys simply can't.