Sensing Social Systems: Towards a True Objective Resilience Framework

Abstract

While infrastructure has historically been the primary focus of resilience assessments, resilient societies are not only a function of physical systems. Urbanization and climate change are unquestionably posing grand challenges that will affect the performance of physical systems. However, they are also imposing new stressors on social systems that may change the ways in which society uses infrastructure. Consequently, true resilience can only be achieved if people and their actions are fully accounted for. This paper presents two new data collection approaches to quantitatively assess human actions in public urban spaces as a preliminary effort to sense and model social systems. Passive infrared sensors integrated into wireless sensing nodes are used to collect anonymous, discrete event data characterizing foot traffic, and security camera video feeds used as continuous data input for computer vision processing. This paper gives an overview of the data collection program and the results from deployments at the Detroit Riverfront. These data sources are used to identify people, quantify their mobility, and classify their activities.