Not just buildings and squares, but also city's occupants. We would be able to detect public gatherings and traffic jams, estimate which neighborhoods are the most crowded, reconstruct commuter traveling patterns during the course of the day. There could be all sorts of new services for the benefit of the public, from emergency planning to traffic control, from the efficient allocation of utilities to assessing the impact of new city infrastructures.

We made this possible, by leveraging those location data that our mobile phones generate throughout the day. We made these data anonymous, then aggregated and processed them using innovative algorithms. Without impinging on the privacy of individual network subscribers, our analyses provide important information on the concentration and relative weights of human activities within a given urban environment.