Flickr’s role in cherry blossom research
Research by Monash University experts has tracked Japanese hanami (flower viewing) via social media images, producing a remarkable map of cherry blossoms across Japan to document their annual bloom and calculate its peak in major cities.
The study gathered 10 years of hanami images from social network sites (SNS) posted between 2008 to 2018 and compared the data with official records of cherry flowering times in Japan, to determine if social media data could be used as a log of tree bloom timing.
The study revealed a detailed seasonal pattern of cherry blossoms blooming from southern to northern Japan over a 12-week period between March and May,
Research co-author Associate Professor Adrian Dyer said traditional research methods of measuring changes in flowering patterns of plants require intense effort over long periods of time and across considerable distances, making the research too expensive to carry out.
“This research demonstrates that it is possible to use contemporary sources, like images from social media, to understand environmental events like flowering patterns,” Associate Professor Dyer said.
The researchers collected images from Flickr that were uploaded by users tagged as ‘Cherry Blossoms’. Computer vision and AI algorithms were applied to the images to filter out those that were irrelevant.
Research co-author Associate Professor Alan Dorin, from the Faculty of Information Technology, said the time stamps and GPS location tags on the filtered images were then used to generate points across a map of Japan showing the seasonal wave of blooms, and to estimate peak bloom times each year in different cities.
“We found our research results to be accurate within a few days when compared against historical flowering data published by the Japan National Tourism Organisation,” Dorin said.
“We are confident this method could be replicated to understand other photogenic ecological patterns and help record the environmental impacts of climate change.”
Hopper’s twist on risk
In an instalment of McKinsey & Co’s Travel Disruptors, Hopper co-founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde has been telling McKinsey’s Jean-Philippe De Montigny what makes Hopper’s financial products unique. Here’s what he had to say:
There are other companies that have dabbled in this. Airlines, for example, allow you to lock in fares for a few hours or a few days. Some other travel portals allow refundability.
But we offer our core fintech products—things like cancelling for any reason—on both hotels and flights, and we allow customers to freeze prices on cars, hotels, and flights. The generalisation of these offerings to every part of the travel wallet is something that nobody else has really done.
The second thing that makes this unique is the sheer scale. Almost half of our customers attach a financial product to a transaction. On average, they buy one-and-a-half financial products. So, there’s a core popularity there. It’s part of what our customers expect from us.
The third element is our ability to price it. Launching a product that freezes a price is relatively easy to do if you’re willing to lose millions of dollars a day. What’s difficult is to do it profitably, and at a price that the consumer will actually agree to pay.
“We can do that because we have a massive data store that we use for our predictive pricing.”
And he had this to say on the biggest lesson he’s learned in his journey at Hopper?
There’s a cheesy quote that gets used in boardrooms: “Skate to where the puck is going.” Hopper started succeeding as a company when we began to build for the future, not for the current state of things.
The best example I can give you is that in 2015, we launched as a mobile-only app when the vast majority of travel commerce in North America took place on desktops. It seemed to make no sense to put all our resources into mobile, which was still a minor channel. But I’d worked in India, where cheap mobile phones had hit the market, and I’d seen that within a few quarters the mobile share of Indian travel commerce grew dramatically.
You don’t need to be 100 years ahead of your time to create an advantage. You just need to be ahead enough to understand where the next generation is going. Today, we have 100 million mobile users because of the decisions we made in 2015.
Airbus to the rescue
A conservation project by the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand’s Sai Yok National Park is one of the recipients of an award under a joint initiative by the Airbus Foundation and the Connected Conservation Foundation.
Under the programme, the Asian Institute of Technology will be given access to very high-resolution data from Airbus satellite systems taken between 2012 and 2022 to monitor the dwindling wild elephant population in the park and develop a habitat quality assessment model to protect the species.
IATA wraps up Istanbul talkfest
IATA has wrapped up its 79th annual meeting in Istanbul. It was a busy and here are some of the outcomes:
Taming turbulence
ANA and WestJet have joined IATA’s Turbulence Aware Platform which was launched in 2018 to help airlines mitigate the impact of turbulence. The platform pools anonymised turbulence data from thousands of flights operated by participating airlines. The real-time, accurate information enables pilots and dispatchers to choose optimal flight paths, avoiding turbulence and flying at optimum levels to maximise fuel efficiency and thereby reduce CO2 carbon emissions.
Profits bounce back
Airline industry operating profits are expected to reach US$22.4 billion in 2023, much improved over the December forecast of a US$3.2 billion operating profit. It is also more than double the US$10.1 billion operating profit estimated for 2022. Some 4.35 billion people are expected to travel in 2023, which is closing in on the 4.54 billion who flew in 2019.
A road map to net-zero
IATA has unveiled a series of roadmaps detailing of critical actions and dependencies for aviation to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. These roadmaps address aircraft technology, energy infrastructure, operations, finance, and policy considerations leading to net zero.
“I must emphasise that the roadmaps are not just for airlines. Governments, suppliers, and financiers cannot be spectators in aviation’s decarbonisation journey. They have skin in the game. The roadmaps are a call to action for all aviation’s stakeholders to deliver the tools needed to make this fundamental transformation of aviation a success with policies and products fit for a net-zero world,” said Willie Walsh, IATA’s director general.
Air France-KLM go with Cytric
Air France-KLM Group has become the first airline partner to add the Amadeus Cytric portfolio to its offering for corporate customers. The new deal features Cytric Travel, Cytric Expense, Cytric Easy and Cytric Care and allows Air France-KLM customers of any size to adopt Cytric solutions.
The deal will mean Air France-KLM will use Amadeus technology for its online corporate solution named ‘BlueConnect’.
Cytric enables the sales teams at Air France-KLM to offer differentiated offers to the group’s direct corporate customers, for example ensuring trips adhere to the customer’s corporate travel policy.
Cytric Easy offers a single location to search, compare or book a hotel, flight or car rental – without ever leaving Microsoft Teams. Users will have the ability to share trip information enabling better connections and collaborations in teams.
