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When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant. To quantify the extent to which urban locations are pleasant, we use data from a crowd-sourcing platform that shows two street scenes in London (out of hundreds), and a user votes on which one looks more beautiful, quiet, and happy. We consider votes from more than 3.3K individuals and translate them into quantitative measures of location perceptions. We arrange those locations into a graph upon which we learn pleasant routes. Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy. To test the generality of our approach, we consider Flickr metadata of more than 3.7M pictures in London and 1.3M in Boston, compute proxies for the crowdsourced beauty dimension (the one for which we have collected the most votes), and evaluate those proxies with 30 participants in London and 54 in Boston. These participants have not only rated our recommendations but have also carefully motivated their choices, providing insights for future work.
Citation preview
The shortest path to happiness: Recommending beautiful, quiet, and
happy routes in the city
Hypertext 2014, Santiago, Chile
Daniele QuerciaRossano SchifanellaLuca Maria Aiello
http://english.cntv.cn/program/newshour/20121010/103940.shtml
Urbanizationsmart and efficient cities are crucial for sustainability
Psychological perceptions of the urban environment
Smart ≠ good
Future cities solely engineered for efficiency might not be good places to live in
Smart ≠ good
Livable cities are those that make their dwellers happy
Yahoo! Confidential & Proprietary. 6 04/08/2023
The Mayor of Happy (Peñalosa, Bogotá)
A case study
When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest
the shortest route
Yahoo! Confidential & Proprietary. 8 04/08/2023
A case study
At times, we do not necessarily take the fastest route but might enjoy alternatives
that offer beautiful urban sceneries
Yahoo! Confidential & Proprietary. 10 04/08/2023
Yahoo! Confidential & Proprietary. 11 04/08/2023
The shortest path to happiness
D. QuerciaYahoo Labs
R. SchifanellaUniversity of Torino
L. M. AielloYahoo Labs
Capturing the Aesthetic Capital
• Urban spaces are related to the emotional perceptions
• Automatically generate routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant
• Which urban elements make people happy?
Which one is more beautiful?
A B
Urbangems.org
1
N
…
• 3300 participants• ~18k rounds of
annotations (~10 images each)
• Answers per scene:• 171 beauty• 12 quiet• 16 happiness
Visual “words” associated with beauty
CSCW’14 – Aesthetic capital: what makes London look beautiful, quiet, and happy
Beautiful sceneries
Victorian houses, red brick
Public garden, green
…and ugly ones
Cars, trafficked streets
…and ugly ones
“Isolated buildings are symptoms of a disconnected, sick society”
“There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy”
Exceptions
0.3
Mapping emotional scores on the city
• Walkable cell of 200x200 meters• Urbangems value for each emotional dimension
Building the paths
• Build a graph linking all adjacent cell• Eppstein’s algorithm for efficient k-shortest paths between
source and destination• Select the path with Marginal Value Theorem (Δ score / Δm = score / m)
SHORTEST HAPPY
BEAUTY QUIET
How do we evaluate it?
1. Validation: Is our proposal able to recommend paths that are pleasant?
2. Length trade-off: Are pleasant paths considerably longer than shortest
3. User assessment: survey
Validation and length tradeoff
• Shortest path as a baseline• 30% more beautiful (and are happier as well)• 26% quieter• 30% happier (and are also more beautiful)
• On average, the recommended paths are only 12% longer
Survey
• 30 participants (lived in London for >2years)• 3 situations (happy, quiet, beauty scenarios)• 4 unlabeled from Euston Square and Tate Modern to
vote
Stronglydisagree
Disagree Agree
Stronglyagree
Neutral
Survey results
• Peaceful, historical, and distinctive are good urban qualities• Busy is the most frequently mentioned negative quality, but
also smell• No consensus on contrasting qualities (e.g.,
historical/charming vs. busy) or experience drastic changes over time (e.g., busy during the week, lovely in the weekend).
Generalization?Flickr!
Method
• For each cell:– number of pictures (density), number of
views, of favorites, of comments, and of tags received by those pictures
– Tags (LIWC dictionary, 72 categories)
Method
• Extract features that are significantly correlated with beauty scores– Density, ’posemo’ (fp), ‘negemo’, ‘swear’,
‘anx’ (anxiety), ‘sad’, and ‘anger’ (fn)• Linear regression whose dependent
variable is the beauty score
BostonFaneuil hall – Trinity church
• Beautiful paths are, on average, 35% more beautiful than the shortest paths and not much longer
• Survey with 54 participants• Flickr beauty performs best
1. Smell & Sound 2. Day vs. Night 3. (personal+shared) Memories
Press coverage
NEWS
Technology EfficiencyEmotions
