CEE Seminar (ZOOM): Geospatial Analytics for Equitable Transportation Planning

Abstract: Cities are urban systems of ever-evolving complexity. To make cities safer and plan their development in an equitable manner requires geographic data that is robust, nuanced and constantly updated. The growing availability of smartphones, wearable devices and fitness trackers have resulted in a data boom, making such data more available to researchers. However, there is a growing need to make sense of such data to understand how people move around in cities and how we can build our cities to be safer, fairer and more active. Such a challenge has led planners and decision-makers to focus on data-driven applications for policymaking. Geospatial analytics is an up and coming area that enables urban planners to gain deeper insights from high resolution spatial and temporal data and extract actionable insights to make informed decisions. This talk will elaborate on how geospatial analytics can be used for urban planning decision making using several case studies such as improved active transportation planning for all ages and abilities, mapping changes in mobility patterns over time, built environment monitoring, and exploring the role of social vulnerability in the spread of infectious diseases, like COVID-19.

Bio: Avipsa Roy is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy at UC Irvine. She earned her doctorate in computational spatial science from Arizona State University and holds a master's degree in geoinformatics from University of Muenster in Germany and a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Calcutta in India. Roy is an interdisciplinary researcher who works on the intersection of transportation, urban planning and data science. She has developed computational models to leverage the use of big data analytics to better plan safer and healthier cities from crowdsourced big data. At the STANCE lab, she and her team are focusing on assessing transportation equity issues related to both nonmotorized modes like bicycling and electric vehicle charging station demands.