Towards Estimating the Presence of Visitors from the Aggregate Mobile Phone Network Activity They Generate

This paper illustrates how aggregated mobile phone network activity logs provide anonymous information that reveals valuable insight into the presence of tourists visiting a city. Technologies supporting pervasive services like cellular networks have the potential to generate vast quantities of detailed subscriber data, raising important privacy concerns. But they also provide to researchers and city planners an unprecedented opportunity to understand the presence and movement of physical communities. We demonstrate how aggregated communication records offer the opportunity to note where people are transmitting and receiving information. The emergence of these spatial imprints obtained through novel technological means has a significant potential to support urban studies and particularly the optimization of tourism strategies, plans and marketing tools. In this study, we examine the use of locally and non-locally registered mobile phones in the vicinity of the “Waterfalls” public exhibit in New York City in 2008. We study aggregated statistics (i.e. number of calls) related to the network sectors covering the exhibit and its proximity. With the future contribution of traditional survey techniques, such as field counts, to calibrate these mobile phone network measurements, we aim to develop techniques to estimate the aggregate movements and location of visitors through time and space, while assuring their privacy.