SADAS for Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge A cutting-edge data analytics prototype for the City of Milan.
#C h a l l e n g e Big Data
With its special contest, Telecom Italia aimed at stimulating IT companies all over the world to tackle a compelling challenge to design the most innovative, creative and feasible applications tailored on Big Data. This competition has moved from a basic concept: Big Data are the shape that most of knowledge deriving from the web (that’s to say: most of human knowledge nowadays) takes. Big Data call for Big Ideas , which, along with being ingenious, need to be appliable and concrete.
Goal By virtue of their quantity, quality and variety, data related to telecommunications represent a classical example of Big Data, but their use in directional activities and marketing still represents a big technological challenge in the analysis of significant historical data that may amount to billions of events. We aim at developing a web tool for historical analysis of telecommunication data applied to the City of Milan and its inhabitants: people using their mobiles and laptops are likely to provide significant insights on issues such as urban development, mobility, sustainability and social integration. We wanted this tool to be able to give real time responses, even at any impromptu, notpreprocessed requests, ensuring the maximum of usability at the same time. All this has to come along with both the sustainability of the processes and a containment of the total cost of ownership.
Our Idea In order to fullfill this project, the Sadas team has developed a graphic, interactive and intuitive web tool to support business processes and management analyses in all areas of urban development: marketing, infrastructure management, decision support, and so on. This web application hints at extracting knowledge, even through new and original patterns of investigation on the territory and its population: social composition, urban distribution of consumer activities, urban distribution of foreign communities, social behavior, urban traffic and much more factors. Two enabling technologies have been deployed in our own research center, Sadas Engine and Sadas BI, which ensure both a consistent reduction in terms of time spent for designing and developing and on line response time for analyses processing.
What stands out as a significant feature in telecommunications is the gap between the huge amount of data and the need to promptly analyse them, and this gap has yet to be solved.
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Luca de Rosa, Head of R&D at SADAS
6 topics to focus on 1. CALL VOLUME TIMESLOTS 2. INTERNATIONAL CALL VOLUME 3. CALL VOLUME 10 MINUTES INTERVAL 4. WEATHER INFLUENCES ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS 5. INTERNATIONAL CALL VOLUME 6. DEVIATIONS
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MS IN, SMS OUT
Received SMS are about twice then those sent, whereas outgoing calls exceed incoming ones by 20/30%. We can hypothesize that there is plenty of SMS services for users to pick and choose. Phone calling predominance usually occurs in those areas where directional services are concentrated.
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HERE ALL SMS AND PHONE CALLS GO?
SMS sent from Milan abroad are addressed mainly to Europe.On the contrary, telephone call are primarly directed to Africa. Technological backwardness and illiteracy may be the main reasons of the predominance of vocal communication on written messages. A crucial clue for advertisers and marketeres who aim at targeting immigrant communities.
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OCIAL AND POLITICAL TRENDS AFFECT CALLS VOLUME
The most called country in the time span considered is Egypt, with outgoing calls exceeding ingoing ones by at least 20 times. This intense traffice may be ascribet to the dramatic sociopoitical events which affected Egypt in November and Dicember 2013. Urban Egyptian communities can be localized on the map of the city of Milan by clicking on the bar graph.
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HEATER IMPACT ON MOBILE AND INTERNET USAGE
Weather conditions consistently affect the efficiency of web and mobile communications in different ways: while SMS volumes drastically drops during snowy days, internet connections work fine in any condition. Witha click, our application pinpoints the 20 areas most affected by the drop in calls, thus allowing the identification of possible infrastructure problems.
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NTERNAL MOBILITY
Part of our analysis on the dataset has been concentrated on calls forwarded to the province of Bari during working hours. We thus have been able to estimate which means of transportations that people commuting from Bari to Milan go for: namely, the map shows how they take both areoplanes and trains and that they get on and off mainly from Central Station rather than from other urban stations. Being able to convert all that mobility is about into concrete figures appears to be crucial for urban planning.
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ILAN AS A TOURISTIC POLE
Having built its image of business and financial capital of Italy, Milan still suffers in the arena of tourist attractiveness from the competiton of its bespoke compatriots, Venice, Florence and Rome in primis. Nevertheless, Lombardy’s power of attraction hasn’t to be underestimated and its county town is enjoying growing flows of tourists, compelled by its vivacity in the art, fashion and design panorama. We have been able to cluster tourists on a national basis and then monitoring behaviours and lifestyle of some of them.
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IGHT AND SOCIAL LIFE:
ANALYSING THE MILANESE “BUZZ”
Monitoring mobile services usage and behaviour on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights , can prove really useful: in fact, by the time you can pinpoint the areas of nightlife and social gathering, you can leverage those information for planning mobility and safety measures throughout the city.
Courtesy of SADAS Photos: Silvia PodestĂ , Marco Bernardi Graphics, contents, impagination: Silvia PodestĂ