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LIDA Seminar Series 9th November 2017

Category
LIDA Seminar
Date
Date
Thursday 9 November 2017, 3:30pm - 6pm
Location
Seminar Room 8.34a Level 8, Worsley Building, University of Leeds, Clarendon Way, Leeds, LS2 9NL
Category

The next Leeds Institute for Data Analytics seminar in our series on data analytics is focussed on global transport datasets and how data analytics can lead to better policies.

We welcome physicist, ecologist and software engineer Dr Mark Padgham from Salzburg University as our main speaker. Dr Padham has been researching mathematics and software for modelling movement patterns for over two decades. He is a prolific programmer, as illustrated by his recently published R packages dodgr and osmdata. The latter will be of interest to anyone following developments in open data: it makes data from the worldwide mapping project OpenStreetMap more accessible than ever before. Mark currently runs a research project on global road infrastructure data.

Dr Padgham's talk is titled "Globally scalable software for sustainable transport". Open source software and increasingly open access datasets have made digital tools for transport planning available to more people than ever before. However, many of the available products are limited by the scale at which they can operate. Recent developments such as the UrbanSim data science toolkit (written primarily in Python) and the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) online mapping tool for prioritising where to build new cycle paths (written in R) have demonstrated that open source software can scale to model transport systems, to city/regional and national levels respectively. This seminar will present an approach to modelling transitions away from fossil fuels which involves less driving but more walking and cycling that can scale globally.

Our second talk will be by Dr James Tate, Associate Professor in the Spatial Modelling and Dynamics Group at the Leeds Institute for Transport Studies (ITS). Dr Tate is a leading expert on vehicular air pollution and as a result his work is having a direct impact on the media debates and public policy shifts related to this urgent issue in the UK and beyond. His talk will be on Software and Hardware to Estimate Air Pollution, at very high resolution, down to individual cars, in a way that can scale.

The first talk will be by Yuanxuan Yang on Dockless Bike Sharing and Urban Dynamics. The recent emerged dockless bike sharing schemes have made huge successes in China and other countries, greatly changed people’s travel mode in urban space. The schemes create large quantities of spatio-temporal data and provide new opportunities for urban transportation research which can help solve the “first/last mile” problem.

AGENDA

15:30-15:40: Dockless Bike Sharing and Urban Dynamics (Yuanxuan Yang)

15:40-16:10: Software and hardware for vehicular emissions monitoring (Dr James Tate)

16:10-17:00: Globally scalable software for sustainable transport (Dr Mark Padgham)

17:00-18:00: Networking, drinks and nibbles

All are welcome to this seminar, please do pass on to colleagues you feel would be interested in attending.

We look forward to welcoming you on the 9th November.