Jane Jacobs first introduce urban vitality in 1961. Urban vitality describes the potential of diversity, intensity, and duration of human actives in the urban space. Since then, it has become an essential concept in urban development and urban studies. Scholars and researchers from different academic backgrounds have represented urban vitality in many ways using diverse data available. Common urban vitality indicators include cellular data, social media posts, traffic volume, small catering businesses' density, point of interest, and night light image. These data also present different characters in terms of frequency; for example, social media posts happen at a higher frequency than night light images and have a finer temporal granularity. Up to the student's selection, diverse data from the case study area are expected to be arranged according to their frequency.

This research will study how these different temporal granularities will result in different urban vitality and further explore how different data or combinations of data can best suit a specific research purpose. Up to the students, different machine learning algorithms could be applied to suggest the relationship between the different results.

Students are also encouraged to use new data and methods such as street view and computer vision to represent urban vitality and perform a comparative study with the existing data and method.