CIM/WISC Seminar with Professor Harvey Miller

Title: Smart Cities: Big opportunities, big challenges

Date: 9 November 2017 at 3pm - room OC1.07 Oculus Building

Abstract: Smart cities attempt to make the movement of people and goods safer, greener and more equitable. For example, the Columbus Smart City Project is reinventing mobility to provide better access to jobs and healthcare, more efficient logistics, greater connectivity for residents and visitors, and more sustainable transportation. However, smart cities can also lead to unintended consequences such as increased vehicle miles traveled, higher pollution, more urban sprawl, higher social inequities, and segregated roadways that are unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the Columbus Smart City Project and discuss the science behind why smart cities can have bad as well as good outcomes. I will also talk about the new data sources and urban science that can shape smart cities toward better outcomes.

After the talk, Professor Harvey will give a masterclass especially targeted at PhD students working on transportation and geographic information, to register please email Vikki Houlden at: V.Houlden@warwick.ac.uk

About the speaker: Professor Harvey Miller is the Bob and Mary Reusche Chair in Geographic Information Science, Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis(CURA) and Professor in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He is also a Courtesy Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, an Affiliated Faculty of the Institute for Population Research and the Translational Data Analytics initiative, a member of the Leadership Team of the Sustainable and Resilient Economy initiative and a member of the STEAM Factory, all at Ohio State. His research and teaching focus on the intersection between geographic information science and transportation science. He wants to understand how people use mobility and communications technologies to allocate scarce time among activities in geographic space – a perspective known as time geography. He is also interested in the social dimensions of transportation, the relationships between mobility and public health and data-driven urban science to support liveable and sustainable communities. His main approach to questions of mobility, livability and sustainability is the development and application of GIS and spatial analysis techniques to extract information from fine-grained mobility and spatio-temporal data.