CUROP Summer Project

As in previous years, I (along with Walter as co-supervisor) have managed to score some University funding for a summer project through the CUROP programme.

This years project is titled “How Unique is my City? An online analysis of the UK”.

A huge amount of information regarding places is available online. Services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Google Places, TripAdvisor etc. allow users to rate and review locations and venues, creating a ’long-tail’ of content describing peoples feelings and interactions with these places. This project seeks to harness this vast wealth of information to examine the relationship between places and people within the urban environment. Analysis of the distribution of types of venues will allow us to assess the individual characteristics of cities, allowing us to determine what makes a city individual and what makes the city similar to all other cities. Further textual analysis of user interactions with venues may allow a deeper understanding towards ‘sense of place’.

This 8-week funded project can cover topics such as large scale data mining, analysis, visualisation and social network analysis, and will largely be shaped by the interests and skills of the student undertaking it.

Interested students can contact me.