Thursday 18 October 2018 13:00 - 14:00

SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

About this event

Intuitively, we often seek out beautiful scenery when we want a respite from our busy lives, but do such settings actually help to boost our wellbeing? While architects, urban planners and policymakers have puzzled over this question for centuries, quantitative analyses have been held back by a lack of data on the beauty of our environment. Now, the vast volumes of geotagged images readily shared on the Internet, alongside developments in computer vision and deep learning, are opening up new opportunities to quantify aspects of the visual environment that were previously hard to measure. In this talk, I will explain how combining survey and mobile phone data with crowdsourced ratings of the “scenicness” of the environment, obtained from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, is providing initial evidence that the beauty of the environment has a crucial link to people's wellbeing. I will also talk about how we used neural networks to not only understand the composition of beautiful places, but also to automatically identify scenic beauty, in both natural and built locations.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 2.04, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

This series is part of the CEP's Community Wellbeing programme.