Increasing urban concentration raises operational challenges that can benefit from integrated monitoring and decision support. Such complex systems need to leverage the full stack of analytical methods, from state estimation using multi-sensor fusion for situational awareness, to prediction and computation of optimal responses. The FASTER platform that we describe in this work, deployed at nation scale and handling 1.5 billion public transport trips a year, offers such a full stack of techniques for this large-scale, real-time problem. FASTER provides fine-grained situational awareness and real-time decision support with the objective of improving the public transport commuter experience. The methods employed range from statistical machine learning to agent-based simulation and mixed-integer optimization. In this work we present an overview of the challenges and methods involved, with details of the commuter movement prediction module, as well as a discussion of open problems.

The preponderance of connected devices provides unprecedented opportunities for fine-grained monitoring of the public infrastructure. However while classical models expect high quality application-specific data streams, the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that of an abundance of disparate and noisy datasets from connected devices. In this context, we consider the problem of estimation of the level of service of a city-wide public transport network. We first propose a robust unsupervised model for train movement inference from wifi traces, via the application of robust clustering methods to a one dimensional spatio-temporal setting. We then explore the extent to which the demand-supply gap can be estimated from connected devices. We propose a classification model of real-time commuter patterns, including both a batch training phase and an online learning component. We describe our deployment architecture and assess our system accuracy on a large-scale anonymized dataset comprising more than 10 billion records.

The Bitcoin transaction graph is a public data structure organized as transactions between addresses, each associated with a logical entity. In this work, we introduce a complete probabilistic model of the Bitcoin Blockchain. We first formulate a set of conditional dependencies induced by the Bitcoin protocol at the block level and derive a corresponding fully observed graphical model of a Bitcoin block. We then extend the model to include hidden entity attributes such as the functional category of the associated logical agent and derive asymptotic bounds on the privacy properties implied by this model. At the network level, we show evidence of complex transaction-to-transaction behavior and present a relevant discriminative model of the agent categories. Performance of both the block-based graphical model and the network-level discriminative model is evaluated on a subset of the public Bitcoin Blockchain.