Qurb: Qatar Urban Analytics

Doha is one of the fastest growing cities of the world with a population that has increased by nearly 40% in the last five years. There are two significant trends that are relevant to our proposal. First, the government of Qatar is actively engaged in embracing the use of fine grained data to “sense” the city for maintaining current services and future planning to ensure a high standard of living for its residents. In this line, QCRI has initiated several research projects related to urban computing to better understand and predict traffic mobility patterns in the city of Doha [1]. Second trend is the high degree of social media participation of the populace, providing a significant amount of time oriented social sensing of the all types of events unfolding in the city. A key element of our vision is to integrate data from physical and social sensing, into what we call socio physical sensing. Another key element of our vision is to develop novel analytics approaches to mine this cross modal data to make various applications for residents smarter than they could be with a single mode of data. The overall goal is to help citizens in their every day life in urban spaces, and also help transportation experts and policy specialists to take a real time data driven approach towards urban planning and real time traffic planning in the city.