Page 21 - Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities

2 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities Introduction 3

1.3 Chapter Word Cloud

A good way to provide a visual overview of the contents of a document is by
creating a word cloud. A word cloud presents the words used most often within
a document with the size of the font in proportion to the frequency of use of
the word, providing a quick and simple way to overview the document’s con-
tents. Figure 1.1 shows the word cloud for Chapter 1. Similar word clouds are
provided at the beginning of each of the remaining chapters.

1.4 Background

This is a wonderful time to be a transportation professional. The opportunities
that technology and data availability provide are significant, and it is a privilege
to have the opportunity to write this book to communicate some of these won-
derful things. In 1997, I wrote a book on the use of system architecture tech-
niques in intelligent transportation systems. The motivation to write the book
was to make valuable techniques and approaches accessible to a wide range
of transportation professionals and others interested in applying system engi-
neering and systematic data analysis techniques to transportation. That book
focused on the interface between system engineering and transportation. This
book presents a similar opportunity with potentially more powerful results.
This new opportunity lies in addressing the interface between transportation
and data science, and thereby illuminating the usefulness and power of recent
advances in data science and analytics within the context of smart cities and
transportation. This book is driven by the same motivation as that for my ear-

Figure 1.1 Word cloud for Chapter 1.