Urban mobility: using mathematical models to predict where and how often we go
Thu, 17 Mar
|HKU-USF Webinar Series
Dr. Paolo Santi
Time & Location
17 Mar 2022, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm HKT
HKU-USF Webinar Series
About the event
Abstract:
Understanding the patterns underlying human mobility in urban areas is essential to better plan cities, engineering traffic, and mitigating diseases. However, existing studies have characterized only some spatial features of mobility — such as travel distance — overlooking an important temporal feature: how frequently do we visit a particular place? And, how is this visitation frequency related to the distance we traveled? Modeling the interplay between spatial and temporal features of mobility is critical; for instance, it can provide urban planners with the information to best place a shopping mall to attract customers. The analysis of over 8 billion human mobility traces collected over four continents reveal that humans have a natural tendency of trading off travel distance with frequency: the further we travel, the less frequently we do it, according to a “visitation law” that can be described through a simple mathematical law. We will then show how this striking discovery can be used to better locate businesses and facilities in urban spaces, and find more effective containment strategies for disease spreading.
About the Speaker:
Paolo Santi is Principal Research Scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab where he leads the MIT/Fraunhofer Ambient Mobility initiative, and a Research Director at the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR, Pisa. Dr. Santi holds a “Laurea” degree and the PhD in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Santi is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and has recently been recognized as Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. His research interest is in the modeling and analysis of complex systems ranging from wireless multi hop networks to sensor and vehicular networks and, more recently, smart mobility and intelligent transportation systems. In these fields, he has contributed more than 170 scientific papers and two books.