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I have a confession to make.
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As a scientist and engineer,
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I've focused on efficiency for many years,
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but efficiency can be a cult,
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and today I'd like to tell you
about a journey
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that moved me out of the cult
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and back to a far richer reality.
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A few years ago, after
finishing my Ph.D in London,
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I moved to Boston.
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I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge.
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I bought a racing bicycle that summer,
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and I bicycled every day to work.
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To find my way, I used my phone.
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It sent me over Mass Ave,
Massachusetts Avenue,
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the shortest route from
Boston to Cambridge.
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But after a month
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that I was cycling every day
on the car park Mass Ave,
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I took a different route one day.
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I'm not entirely sure why I took
a different route that day, a detour.
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I just remember a feeling of surprise,
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surprise at finding a street with no cars
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as opposed to the nearby
Mass Ave full of cars;
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surprised at finding a street draped
by the leaves and surrounded by trees.
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But after the feeling of surprise,
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I felt ashamed.
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How could I have been so blind?
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For an entire month,
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I was trapped in my mobile lab
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that a journey to work
became one thing only:
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the shortest path.
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In the single journey,
there was no thought
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of enjoying the road,
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no pleasure in connecting with nature,
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no possibility of looking
people in the eyes.
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And why?
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Because I was saving a minute
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out of my commute.
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Now let me ask you: am I alone here?
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How many of you have never used
a mapping app for finding directions?
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Most of you, if not all, have,
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and don't get me wrong, mapping apps
are the greatest game-changer
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for encouraging people
to explore the city.
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You take your phone out
and you know immediately
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where to go.
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However, the app also assumes
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there are only a handful
of directions to the destination.
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It has the power to make
those handful of directions
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the definitive direction
to that destination.
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After that experience, I changed.
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I changed my research
from traditional data-mining
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to understanding how people
experience the city.
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I used computer science tools
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to replicate social science
experiments at scale,
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at web scale.
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I became captivated
by the beauty and genius
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of traditional social science experiments
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done by Jane Jacobs,
Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch.
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The result of that research
has been the creation of new maps,
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maps where you don't only find
the shortest path, the blue one,
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but also the most enjoyable path,
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the red one.
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How was that possible?
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Einstein once said,
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logic will get you from A to B,
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imagination will take you everywhere.
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So with a bit of imagination,
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we needed to understand
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which parts of the city
people find beautiful.
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At the University of Cambridge,
with colleagues,
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we thought about this simple experiment.
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If I were to show you
these two urban scenes,
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and I were to ask you
which one is more beautiful,
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which one would you say?
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Don't be shy.
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Who says A? Who says B?
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Brilliant.
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Based on that idea,
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we built a crowdsourcing platform,
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a web game.
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Players are shown pairs of urban scenes,
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and they're asked to choose
which one is more beautiful,
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quiet, and happy.
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Based on thousands of user votes,
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then we are able to see
where consensus emerges.
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We are able to see which
are the urban scenes
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that make people happy.
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After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs,
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and I teamed up with Lucca and Rosano,
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and together, we aggregated
those winning locations in London
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to build a new map of the city,
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a cartography weighted for human emotions.
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On this cartography, you're not only
able to see and connect
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from point A to point B
the shortest segments,
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but you're also able
to see the happy segment,
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the beautiful path, the quiet path.
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In tests, participants found the happy,
the beautiful, the quiet path
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far more enjoyable than the shortest one,
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and that just by adding
a few minutes to travel time.
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Participants also love to attach
memories to places.
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Shared memories
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-- that's where the
old BBC building was –-
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and personal memories
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-- that's where I gave my first kiss.
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They also recall how the path
smelled and sounded.
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So what if we had a mapping tool
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that would return
the most enjoyable routes
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based not only on aesthetics
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but also based on smell,
sound, and memories.
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That's where our research
is going right now.
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More generally, my research,
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what it tries to do is avoid
the danger of the single path,
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to avoid robbing people of fully
experiencing the city in which they live.
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Walk the path through the park,
not through the car park,
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and you have an entirely different path.
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Walk the path full of people you love
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and not full of cars,
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and you have an entirely different path.
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It's that simple.
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I would like to end with this thought:
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do you remember "The Truman Show?"
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It's a media satire in which a real person
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doesn't know he's living
in a fabricated world.
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Perhaps we live in a world
fabricated for efficiency.
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Look at some of your daily habits,
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and as Truman did in the movie,
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escape the fabricated world.
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Why?
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Well, if you think that adventure
is dangerous, try routine.
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It's deadly. Thank you.
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(Applause)