Time

1:40pm - 3:00pm

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village, UC Davis

Speaker(s)

Abstract

Cities are urban systems of ever-evolving complexity. Transportation planning is an integral component in efficient operation of cities. To make transportation safe and equitable we need to rely on high resolution geographic data that is robust, nuanced and constantly updated.  The growing availability of emerging technologies and prevalence of location based devices have resulted in a data boom making such big data more available to researchers. As a result, there is a need to make sense of such data to understand how to make cities safer, improve access to transportation amenities such as bikeways and bike paths. Such a challenge has led planners and decision-makers to focus on data-driven approaches for policymaking. Spatial analytics is an up and coming area which enables urban planners gain deeper insights from high resolution spatial and temporal data and extract actionable insights to make informed decisions about safety and infrastructure planning. This talk will elaborate on some of the geospatial analytics methods used in recent research including case studies on addressing bias in crowdsourced data for active transportation, mapping changes in bicycling ridership patterns and assessing the equitable distribution of EV charging stations.

Biographical Sketch

Avipsa Roy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy and a faculty affiliate at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine. She conducts interdisciplinary research relevant to planning smart, resilient and safe cities. She is interested in studying the complex nature of urban systems using big data and has developed computational methods to address issues related to active transportation planning, safety and electric vehicle charging equity in the urban context using machine learning approaches. Her research has been funded by the Haynes Foundation, CalTrans, SCAG and she has also collaborated on projects funded through the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.