About Livehoods

Livehoods is a research project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We present novel technologies and methods for revealing, visualizing, and understanding the dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale. Using location-tagged data such as tweets and check-ins, we are able to discover the hidden structures of the city using machine learning. Our techniques reveal a snap-shot of the dynamic areas that comprise the city, which we call Livehoods.

Livehoods received a Best Paper Award in 2012 at ICWSM, and its sustained influence was recognized by ICWSM again in 2022 with a Test of Time Award.

Publications and Patents

The Livehoods Project: Utilizing Social Media to Understand the Dynamics of a City. Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz, Jason I. Hong, and Norman Sadeh. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 6(1), 58-65. 2012.

Carnegie Mellon has also been issued multiple patents for inventions based on the Livehoods research. See more information about our patents.