Batman or the joker?: the powerful urban computing and its ethics issues

Kaiqun Fu, Abdulaziz Alhamadani, Taoran Ji

Abstract

The exponential growth of the urban data generated by urban sensors, government reports, and crowd-sourcing services endorses the rapid development of urban computing and spatial data mining technologies. Easier accessibility to such enormous urban data may be a double-bladed sword. On the one hand, urban data can be applied to solve a wide range of practical issues such as urban safety analysis and urban event detection. On the other hand, ethical issues such as biasedly polluted urban data, problematic algorithms, and unprotected privacy may cause moral disaster not only for the research fields but also for the society. This paper seeks to identify ethical vulnerabilities from three primary research directions of urban computing: urban safety analysis, urban transportation analysis, and social media analysis for urban events. Visions for future improvements in the perspective of ethics are addressed.