The creativity team has been awarded with the Bridge Grant funded by the Young Researcher in Complex System Science. The grant served to ignite the “Urban semantic: understanding mobility patterns using word embeddings” research project that aims at the characterization of the functional roles that different areas of a city have in time. The challenge is addressed by adopting a novel and interdisciplinary approach: instead of focussing on the study of the single user mobility patterns within a static representation of urban areas, we investigate the functional relations between different zones of a city and how they evolve in time.
To this end, we change the common modelling perspective adopting tools and ideas from Natural Language Processing (NLP) to describe the urban systems under investigation.