Research & Development

Keynote
Happy maps, Daniele Quercia
B1–C2
Discussion
1 Work in groups. Discuss the questions.
1 How do you get to work or classes? Do you always take the same route? Do you always use the
same form of transport?
2 What might make you decide to take a different route, or use an alternative form of transport?
3 Do you ever use a mapping app for finding directions? When do you normally use it? Why?

Key words
2 Read this summary of Daniele Quercia’s TED Talk, Happy maps. Match the words and phrases in
bold with their definitions (1–10).
Daniele Quercia works in the field of computational social science. One day, after a month of
cycling the same route to work at the University of Cambridge in Boston, he took a detour and
was surprised to find himself in a tree-lined road with no cars. He was ashamed that up to that
day, in order to save a minute on his daily commute, and by following the definitive route
suggested by his mapping app, he had been missing the chance to connect with people and
nature.
This experience led him to change his research. He began conducting social science experiments
at scale using a web game to crowdsource the data. He asked players which urban scenes people
found more attractive. Based on thousands of votes, he was able to find out where consensus
emerged. He aggregated the results and came up with a whole new field of cartography that
could be weighted for human emotions rather than efficiency.

1 the business of making maps ____________________

2 connected with cities and towns and not the countryside ____________________
3 a different and possibly longer route to the one you usually take ____________________
4 giving more importance to one thing than others ____________________
5 agreement between many people ____________________
6 a person’s regular journey to and from work ____________________
7 get information or help from many people to develop something, usually using the Internet
____________________
8 the best version of something ____________________
9 at a particular size – larger or smaller – than the original ____________________
10 calculated the total ____________________

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Happy maps
Comprehension
3 Watch Daniele Quercia’s talk on TED.com. Choose the correct option (a, b or c) to complete
these sentences.

1 After Daniele Quercia took a detour to work he felt _____ .

a surprised and emotional
b emotional and ashamed
c surprised and ashamed

2 Daniele Quercia says that normal mapping apps _____ .

a discourage people from exploring the city
b are often incorrect and need further development
c are great at encouraging people to explore the city

3 In the game, players compare photos of _____ .

a two scenes of the city
b two scenes of the countryside
c two photos of the same buildings

4 The results of his research _____ .

a showed why people are happiest in the countryside
b showed which city scenes people liked the best
c helped him create a new mapping app for Boston

5 At the time of his TED Talk, Daniele Quercia was _____ .

a doing a PhD in cartography
b a researcher and developer for Yahoo
c a small business entrepreneur

6 He wanted to make mapping apps based on _____ .

a nature, sound, smells and memories
b speed, efficiency, nature and music
c going through parks and meeting people

The big idea

4 Work in groups. Discuss the questions.
1 In which ways does Daniele Quercia believe that his mapping app will enrich people's everyday
journeys? How many of these are important to you personally?
2 Which four kinds of routes does his new London city map show? Which type would you prefer to
use to get to work?
3 Do you agree that taking the same route every day stops people fully experiencing a city? Why?
4 Who do you think might be interested in buying and using this kind of app?
5 Did his talk make you want to buy one of his apps? Why / Why not?

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Happy maps
Language focus – Research & Development
5 Match the words and phrases to make expressions from the TED Talk.
1 computer science emotions
2 human mining
3 at (web) tools
4 data scale

5 crowdsourcing for
6 social science platform
7 teamed up experiments
8 weighted with

6 Complete this text with the expressions from Exercise 5. Then watch the TED Talk from
2.56−5.00 again and check your answers.
Quercia changed his research from traditional 1____________________ to understanding how
people experience cities. He used 2___________________ to replicate 3____________________
4
________ web __________ . He built a 5___________________ , a web game in which players
were shown pairs of urban scenes, and asked to choose which one was more beautiful, quiet and
happy. Then he 6____________________ Luca and Rossano, and together, they aggregated those
winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography which was
7
____________________ 8____________________.

7 Work in pairs. Use the sentence beginnings to talk about your own research, or research that
you know about.
1 Our research is based on …
2 We recently teamed up with …
3 We use computer science / social science tools to … In tests, we found that …
4 The results of the research we are doing are …
5 I see our research going towards … in the future.

Speaking
8 Work in pairs. Describe your daily commute or another journey you take on a regular basis. If
possible, look at it on a map. Say what you like about this journey and what you most dislike.
Discuss alternative routes for each other. Identify the types of routes they are, e.g. quiet,
beautiful, clean, avoiding people, etc. Make a list of these alternative route categories, and add
them to the four categories described in the TED Talk.

9 Work in groups. You are developing a mapping app that offers users a variety of different
criteria for finding different routes. Discuss the questions.
1 What categories from Exercise 8 might be interesting to users? Why?
2 What kind of research would you carry out to develop the app?
3 Which ideas would be the easiest to research? Which ideas would be easiest to market?

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