Towards connecting people, locations and real-world events in a cellular network [conference item]

Being able to react fast to exceptional events such as riots, protests or disaster preventions is of paramount importance, especially when trying to ensure peoples’ safety and security, or even save lives. In this paper we study the use of fully anonymized and highly aggregate cellular network data, like Call Detail Records (CDRs) in order to analyze the telecommunication traffic and connect people, locations and events. The goal of this study is to see if the CDR data can be used to detect exceptional spatio-temporal patterns of the collective human mobile data usage and correlate these ‘anomalies’ with real-world events (e.g., religious festivals, public concerts, traffic congestion, riots protests etc.). These observations could be further used to develop an intelligent system that detects exceptional events in real-time from CDRs data monitoring. Such system could be used in intelligent transportation management, urban planning, emergency situations, network resource allocation and performance optimization, etc.