Data Analytics and Microsimulations for Urban and Transport Systems
Recent years have witnessed the exponential growths in the computing power and the emergence of big data in different shapes and forms. These technological advancements gave rise to more elaborate and realistic representations of the social and urban environments that currently house the majority of the population. They also contribute to the growing capability of modeling human mobility both at finer spatiotemporal scales and with wider coverages. Microsimulations as analytical tools were brought forward a few decades ago and have gained rising popularities in urban analytics following the current developments. Data-centric approaches have also received much attention in the geospatial and urban research domains. Against this backdrop, this talk will cover some of the speaker’s works in big data analytics and urban microsimulations during the past few years. Several research topics will be discussed, including urban spatial interactions, land use patterns, agent-based simulations, and future scenario analysis. The talk will end with a few remarks on some possible future research directions in urban and transportation arenas.
Dr. Meng ZHOU is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University. Prior to his current post, he obtained his PhD degree from the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University and later worked for the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) as a Postdoctoral Associate. His research interests include transport geography, geographic information science, urban analytics, and urban simulations. He has experiences in the teaching and research in the fields of GIS, transportation, and urban studies and participated in a number of research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and the National Research Foundation of Singapore.