ABSTRACT
Happiness traditionally attributed to wealth, health and social relationships has been observed to be influenced by peoples' dwelling locations. It has also been found that people are happier even when they tour around or traverse in cities and places by choosing paths that are emotionally pleasing, and appealing to the senses. This has been the theme of the paper titled The Shortest Path to Happiness: Recommending Beautiful, Quiet and Happy Routes in the City by Quercia, Schifanella and Aiello. The paper is considered a masterpiece in computational social science, particularly in psycho-geography. The goal of the paper is to suggest to people, traversing in cities, routes that are not only short by distance but also make them happy and emotionally comfortable. The authors use data from crowd-sourcing platforms and user votes to decide which routes look more beautiful, quiet, and happy during journeys. The remainder of this document presents the summary and critique of the paper and offers future options for a research paper in computational social science.
Keywords
path, happiness, city-critique