July 7, 2016

Please join us for a postdoc candidate research seminar with Wei Huang, currently a PhD candidate at Ryerson University.

Understanding Human Activity Patterns in Urban Environments

Abstract

The way people live, work, and play in cities indeed shapes human activity patterns, which affects how an urban system works. As such, a reasonable human movement prediction and mechanistic understanding of human activity patterns can aid in contributing to a diversity of urban applications, such as urban planning, traffic forecasting, and epidemic prevention. In this presentation, a novel way to predict where people are traveling with consideration of activity changes is first introduced. By applying the proposed algorithm of human activity change detection for six-year GPS trajectories of human movement, the predictive accuracy is significantly improved. Then, a model which can depict human activity patterns not only from spatiotemporal dimensions but also with consideration of the associated motivation represented by semantic patters is presented. Some findings based on the analysis of the human activity patterns uncovered from one-year geo-tagged Tweets posted in Toronto are discussed.

Bio

Mr. Wei Huang is a final year PhD candidate of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He received his joint Master degree in Geographic Information Science (GIS) from Peking University and Central South University, China in 2011 and Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Beijing University of Chemical and Technology, China in 2008. His PhD research mainly focuses on analyzing, modeling, and predicting human mobility and activity patterns based on Big Data. He is also interested in exploring how urban citizens interact with urban environments through analyzing human activity patterns. He has published 7 peer-reviewed journal papers, 5 conference papers and won a best paper award (1st place). He has presented his research work several times in different international conferences. He is the sole international student (1st rank) who won OGS (Ontario Graduate Scholarship) in the Department of Civil Engineering at Ryerson University in the 2015-2016 academic year.