TRANSP Seminar: Dr. Clio Andris, Assistant Professor Enhancing Spatial Interaction Research with Social Flows and Creative Data Sets

Abstract

Social networks and social flow data are geospatial structures that evidence not only interpersonal relationships (kinship, professional ties, friends, institution members, romantic partners etc.), but also the potentiality of travel, migration, monetary exchange and information transfer. In this seminar, Dr. Andris will describe how these networks and flows can be for creative new perspectives on existing travel and transportation practices and methodologies. First, data that evidence interpersonal relationships can be used to guide transportation demand by producing a greater variety of OD matrices. Secondly, fine grained GPS traces can be used to measure community isolation and neighborhood cohesion to guide infrastructure planning and resource allocation. Thirdly, these new datasets can add a new dimension to the interpersonal benefits of point of interests (POI) and neighborhood amenities. Lastly, better online and institutional records can help us better understand migrant and travel flows facilitated by institutions such as the military and universities. However, harnessing these networks and embedding them has presented a challenge to researchers who lack crucial definitions of how social flows, social capital, and social networks may be measured for these purposes. Dr. Andris will outline initiatives and potential best practices to improve how we can plan for new movement demand, create rules of thumb for movement between cities, better distinguish POIs and build new infrastructure that not only follows existing relationships but avoids splitting existing communities.

Biography

Dr. Clio Andris is an assistant professor of geography at Penn State working at the intersection of social networks and geographic information science (GIS). She specializes in social flow theory and is interested in how interpersonal relationships can be integrated into geographic models. She is the director of the Friendly Cities Lab, an initiative that uses creative data sets to better understand human behavior in cities and plan for cities that support healthy relationships. Her research has included case studies using mobile phone data, taxi usage, U.S. inter-urban migration, mentorships, retail outlets, university admissions and athletics, and interior design. She completed her PhD at MIT in Urban Information Systems and was a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

Pizza will be provided!