Activities

Organicity's London dataset released

The OrganiCity EU project is coming to an end this March, and we are preparing to summarize the results of the last 3-4 months of experimentation. Magenta will attend the OrganiCity Workshop on 30th of March at Future Cities Catapult in London. In the meantime, at this link you can find a dataset containing all the data collected by our sensors in London from January 11th to March 23rd. The .

Londoners' nightlife

On February 24th, we were again in London to install some new TrafficFlow sensors. Thanks to the precious help of Hackney Borough, we found the collaboration of the Open Data Institute in London. They lent us one of their windows and a network connection, and they are now hosting a sensor that monitors the junction between Worship St. and Clifton St. Here’s the sensor in action: The sensor configuration is quite complex.

Friday nights in Shoreditch

This week we focus on something more exciting than car traffic. As weekend is approaching, we like to give you insights on a quantitative measure of how the activity changes in one of the most crowded spots of the London nightlife: Hoxton Sq. Our sensor is positioned to measure activity close to the south/west corner of the square, just outside the “Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen”. The chart below clearly shows how the activity is influenced by the opening time of the place:

Hello, London

In the context of the Organicity project, we started our activities in the City of London, for an experiment on Participatory Traffic Monitoring with IoT Sensors. The experiment focus on measuring traffic in and around the borough of Hackney, and in particular in the zone around the Shoreditch Triangle. We placed two sensors already, one in Hoxton square and the other in Bethnal Green Road. The latter is hosted by the building of the Newspeak House.

The "fochi" of Saint John one year later

Do you remember our post on Saint John’s ‘fochi’? A year has passed, and another show took place on June 24th, but now we have a lot more sensors in the field to monitor the event! See the results in the plots below! This plot shows the traffic flow in Via Reginaldo Giuliani. The top row shows the traffic flow towards Sesto Fiorentino, while the bottom row shows the traffic towards Florence.

Magenta presented results of CHEST/TrafficFlow project at MAPEC 'Ambiente e salute' congress

MAPEC is a EU funded project committed in monitoring of air pollution effects on children in order to support public health policies. On June 16th 2016, partners of MAPEC project organized the first Central Italian Mapec Workshop, held in Pisa with the title “Aria e salute: molti punti di vista per una visione d’insieme”. During the event, midterm results of MAPEC project have been presented. Being vehicles’ traffic one of the most important source of pollution, Magenta was invited, beside others, to attend to the event presenting the results of CHEST/TrafficFlow project.

New paper published in CSUM international conference proceedings

As we announced in our previous post, the paper we submitted with IBIMET to the 3rd Conference on sustainable Urban Mobility has been published in the conference proceedings: A. Zaldei, F. Camilli, T. De Filippis, F. Di Gennaro, S. Di Lonardo, F. Dini, B. Gioli, G. Gualtieri, A. Matese, W. Nunziati, L. Rocchi, P. Toscano, C. Vagnoli, “An integrated low-cost road traffic and air pollution monitoring platform for next citizen observatories”, 3rd Conference on Sustainable Urban Mobility, 26-27 May, 2016, Volos, Greece

Magenta starts collaboration with IBIMET for joint traffic flow and air quality monitoring

In January 2016 Magenta started a collaboration with IBIMET, the Institute of Biometeorology of the italian National Research Council. IBIMET developed a low-cost platform for air quality monitoring called AIRQino and it is involved in several projects focused on smart-cities. Magenta and IBIMET are going to share their monitoring platform and collected data in order to investigate the correlation between traffic flows and the concentration of various pollutants in urban environments.

CHEST/TrafficFlow at Caffè-Scienza

“Caffè-Scienza” is the italian version of “Café Scientifique”: a grassroots public science initiative that aims at demystifying scientific research for the general public and empower non-scientists to more comfortably and accurately assess science and technology issues, by means of informal meetings in which one or several scientists are invited to talk in laymen’s term about their work or topic. Café Scientifiques spread from England, where they were born, to many other countries.

CHEST/TrafficFlow becomes an open data provider for the Florence municipality

Starting today, at this page the local municipality of Florence is publishing amongst its open data those provided by Magenta’s CHEST/TrafficFlow sensors placed in the city. That is a great achievement for the project! We are talking of 5 sensors monitoring 9 lanes, but that will soon grow to include a couple of new sensor we are going to install in the next weeks.

CHEST/TrafficFlow work progress

Hi there! We have been quite busy in the last couple of months and we disregarded the website a bit. It is time to remedy and give you an update on the work progress. We have worked on several aspect. We improved the sensors, making it more robust so to increase its reliability and having it require less maintenance. We improved the tools we use to monitor the activity of deployed sensor and to produce our plots:

Pope Francis visiting Florence

On November the 10th Pope Francis visited the city of Florence and that has had a wide impact on the city’s mobility, as you can see from this map released by the Florence municipality: The map shows all the measures taken by the municipality regarding traffic modifications in the city. We added a little red circle on the map: that is the position of one of our first sensors (here labeled “FI-CENTRO”), and luckily, it is placed right on the pope-mobile path!

Special event: 1st August Florence's downburst seen from a traffic sensor in the middle of storm

Around 7:20 PM of 1st August 2015 Florence has been hit by an unusual weather phenomenon: a strong downburst that caused a lot of damages in terms of eradicated trees, smashed cars and roofless houses. It has been a very violent phenomenon that changed forever the look of the southern part of the city. Via Villamagna, beside being one of the most interesting site that hosts a traffic sensor of ours, is also at the center of the area that has been interested by the downburst.

Special event: The "fochi" of Saint John as seen from our traffic sensor

Each year on 24th June Florence celebrate its patron saints festival (Saint John) with the usual fireworks show (the so-called “fochi di San Giovanni”). It is a very old tradition, loved and awaited by many Florentines, that each year overcrowd squares, boulevards and riversides of the city to look (and criticize, as the tradition requires - “l’eran meglio quelli d’anno!”) “i fochi”. The fireworks show is so popular that it is not uncommon for people coming from the suburbs of the city or from nearby towns to find themselves stuck in the traffic, and when the show begins, many people just turn off the engine and drop off his car in the middle of the street to enjoy the show (usually causing the complaints of other drivers, but that is another story…).

Data story: Sesto Fiorentino, part III (final)

And this is the last part of the data story for Sesto Fiorentino. Vehicle class: “buses and trucks”. After looking at the three infografics, now we can say it: there seems to be an unusally low traffic in Sesto Fiorentino on monday. But why? More on this in the next posts… Infographics by Matteo Bencini.

Data story: Sesto Fiorentino, part II

Ok, we usually do not publish more than one infografic per day, but since we publish our last (and first, actually) story about a month ago, I think we can make an exception. Here’s the infografic for Sesto Fiorentino, first week, vehicle class “bikes and motorbikes”. Infographics by Matteo Bencini.

Data story: Sesto Fiorentino, part I

Today we are going to tell you a new data story. Sesto Fiorentino is a small town a few kilometers away from Florence. About 20 days ago we installed a VehicleCounter at the window of a school facing one of the most central streets in town. The street is single-lane and from where the sensor is placed it leads to the center. Here’s the first infografics, related to the first week of operations, vehicle class “cars”.

New records scored!

Almost two months have passed since we deployed the first VehicleCounter at Palazzo Medici Riccardi (remember?). The first few weeks we had to do a little bug fixing, try some configurations, set up data transfer… but you know? That very first VehicleCounter scored a new uptime record, being up and running without intervention since more than a month ago! Our VehicleCounter sensor in Palazzo Medici Riccardi scored a new uptime record!

First data story, part III (final)

To complete the first data story, here’s the last infographic. This brings data about trucks and buses, and other similar sized vehicles. There is something that worths noticing here. Do you remember what we said about buses passing in Via Cavour? Well, this is a detailed view of the situation! Infographics by Matteo Bencini.

First data story, part II

Yesterday we published the first data story regarding the flow of “cars” detected by the sensor in Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Today it is the time of “bikes and motorcycles”. More generally, everything smaller than a city car goes here… Infographics by Matteo Bencini.

First Data Story from Palazzo Medici Riccardi

Starting today, we will publish every few days what we call “Data Stories”: briefly, infographics that bring to you the information grabbed by our sensors. The first story regards the flow of vehicles of class “car” detected in the week 1st-7th June by the sensor placed in Palazzo Medici Riccardi (do you remember our pilot installation? It’s still there, up and running counting!) This includes city cars, sedan, vans, and almost every 4-wheeled vehicles, except trucks and buses.

First set of sensors ready!

And here they are, the first VehicleCounter sensors ready to be installed at the window of our volunteers! Starting next week, these sensors will be distributed to the people that volunteered to support CHEST/TrafficFlow by lending their window to host a VehicleCounter traffic sensor. In the first phase, engineers from Magenta srl will personally install and configure the sensors. Lately, we hope that this could be done entirely by the users.

Interesting data from VehicleCounter #0 in Palazzo Medici Riccardi

After the meeting with local municipalities in Palazzo Medici Riccardi, we left the sample #0 of VehicleCounter working from the windows overlooking Via Cavour. It is a very central street in Florence, that runs from Piazza del Duomo, at the very heart of the city, to the boundary of the historical center. This is how it looks from the windows of Palazzo Medici Riccardi: VehicleCounter configuration page as it looks at Via Cavour from Palazzo Medici Riccardi's windows.

Meeting at Palazzo Medici Riccardi with local municipalities of Florence area

To help spreading the CHEST/TrafficFlow project and enlarge the potential users base, Magenta asked and achieved the endorsement of Città Metropolitana di Firenze (former Provincia di Firenze), which gathers 42 municipalities from Florence area. Their mayors and technicians have been invited to participate to a meeting that was held in Palazzo Medici Riccardi, headquarters of Città Metropolitana, on May 20th 2015. In the event, together with representatives of Città Metropolitana di Firenze, engineers from Magenta explained the project details to the attending municipalities, with the goal of identify those among them that are willing to experiment Magenta’s traffic monitoring solution by participating at CHEST/TrafficFlow.

First set of VehicleCounters in preparation

Yesterday May 18th 2015 the first set of Raspberry Pi B+ with Pi NoIR camera arrived! The VehicleCounter distribution for Raspberry Pi is ready, so there’s nothing else to do but start assembling the hardware and delivery the VehicleCounter to the first set of volunteers! Lots of new hardware! Standard VehicleCounters will be build of: A Raspberry Pi B+ with a 8 GB uSD card Pi NoIR Camera Board PiFace Shim RTC module Wireless USB adapter (Ralink chipset) USB power adapter A suction-cup mobile phone holder or other stand to install the VehicleCounter in place Here’s VehicleCounter #0 at work, from the window of our office.

Leave us a comment!

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First TrafficFlow meeting was a success!

The meeting held on Wednesday, April 22nd 2015 at Impact Hub Florence was a good success! Magenta’s engineers have explained the goals of TrafficFlow projects and demoed their VehicleCounter application to an audience of about 15 potential recipients of a Raspberry Pi B+ with VehicleCounter on board!

Setup ready for Impact Hub event!

As you can see from the pictures below, everything is ready for the event that will take place at Impact Hub Florence on Wednesday, April 22nd 2015. People from Magenta and Lama met at Impact Hub Florence on Monday 20th, to setup up a working instance of VehicleCounter. An Axis P1353 smart camera hosting VehicleCounter has been installed outside the window of Impact Hub building, watching the nearby road. VehicleCounter has been configured and is running just fine!

CHEST-TrafficFlow presentation at Impact Hub Florence

Wednesday, April 22nd 2015 engineers from Magenta will speak about the CHEST-TrafficFlow project at Impact Hub Florence. If you are interested and willing to participate in this innovative social project, drop us a line at chest-trafficflow@magentalab.it. Let’s meet at 16:30 in Via Panciatichi 10-14, Firenze (Italy)!

Project kickstart

Activities for CHEST project ‘Traffic Flow’ started on 1st March 2015. Magenta’s engineers started the activity of porting its image processing and video analysis technology to Raspberry Pi platform. As a proof of concept, Magenta identified hardware components that are suitable to build cheap, stand-alone, self-powered smart cameras, both for indoor and outdoor application, as shown in the pictures below. Battery powered Raspberry Pi B+ with raspi-cam in outdoor case Battery powered Raspberry Pi B+ with raspi-cam in outdoor case Battery powered Raspberry Pi B+ with raspi-cam Battery powered Raspberry Pi B+ with raspi-cam