Title: Big Data Analytics for Urban Sustainability: State of the Art
Over the last several years many private and public sector agencies have been interested in how sensor data, social media, mobile technologies, and data visualization can help us manage our urban environments. IBM has coined the term "Smart Cities" to describe the recent development in this area, while CISCO calls it "Intelligent Cities".
Analysis of big data created by human activity allows a better understanding of present cities as well as the design of innovative concepts for the future ones. And opposed to the traditional survey-based approach big data analysis possesses a number of advantages such as lower cost, instant availability, objectiveness and accuracy.
This talk with present ongoing research on how very large scale geo-location data from taxis and social media can be used for understanding urban activity patterns and predicting congestion in cities. Specifically, this study will use data from Foursquare and Twitter to characterize and predict activity patterns in an urban area. In addition, the potential role of this datasets for predicting network state and travel time will be discussed using sample data sets collected at the Integrative Transportation Analytics group at Purdue University.
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Bio:
Dr. Satish Ukkusuri is a Full Professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. Ukkusuri is recognized nationally and internationally in the area of transportation network modeling and disaster management. He leads the Interdisciplinary Transportation Modeling and Analytics Lab at Purdue. His current areas of interest include: dynamic traffic modeling, network design, use of real-time information for travel time prediction, use of large scale disaggregate data sets to predict traffic system state, signal control with vehicle to vehicle/infrastructure (V2V and V2I) information exchange, behavioral issues in natural hazards such as hurricanes, evacuation modeling, modeling cap and trade policies, modeling policy questions related to plug-in electric vehicles, freight traffic networks, logistics and safety modeling. He uses interdisciplinary modeling techniques to address issues at the intersection of multiple disciplines. He has published methodological works and practical papers on the above topics in peer reviewed journals and conferences. Dr. Ukkusuri's work has been funded by various grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), State Departments of Transportation including NYSDOT, NJDOT and NYCDOT, Global Policy Research Institute and Purdue Research Foundation.
Dr. Ukkusuri recieved the 2005 SWUTC Robert Herman Award given for outstanding research and leadership in transportation. He also recieved the Blitman Endowed Chair Professorship during his tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from August 2005 - August 2009. He recieved the 2007 CP-STIO Award from Government of India to conduct collaborative research with IIT Bombay and the 2007 Emerging Scholars Grant from UTRC. In 2011, Dr. Ukkusuri recieved the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Award given for “outstanding research and leadership by a new faculty member in the United States”. Dr. Ukkusuri is a member of the Transportation Network Modeling committee at Transportation Research Board (National Academies). He is the Chair of the ITS Special Interest Group (SIG) at theInstitute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). Dr. Ukkusuri is an Area Editor for the journal, Networks and Spatial Economics, is on the Editorial Advisor Board of Transportation Research Part-B and was the Editor of overview papers for the journal of Transportation Research Part-C (Emerging Technologies) from January 2008-December 2011. He reviews papers and proposals for various journals and funding agencies respectively.