Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-240

Description

The rapid progress of urbanization on earth leads to modern cities, which provide people with a comfortable life; but urbanization is followed by big challenges, such as traffic jams, increasing population, energy consumption, and pollution. Urban computing is emerging as a concept where every sensor, device, person, vehicle, building, and street in the urban areas can be used as a component to probe city dynamics to further enable city-wide computing for coping with these challenges. Urban computing aims to enhance both human life and urban environment smartly through a recurrent process of sensing, mining, understanding, and improving. Urban computing also aims to deeply understand the nature and sciences behind the phenomenon occurring in urban spaces, using a variety of heterogeneous data sources representing city dynamics, such as traffic flows, human mobility, geographic data, environment, energy consumption, populations, and economics. This presentation will substantiate the concept of urban computing with some concrete systems and technology tackling the most challenging traffic problems in a city. Details of these research projects can be found on http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/urbancomputing/default.aspx.

Biographies

Dr. Yu Zheng is a researcher from Microsoft Research Asia. He is a enior member of IEEE and ACM. His research interests include trajectory data mining, location-based social networks, and urban computing. He has published or presented over 50 papers in international conferences and journals, such as SIGMOD, SIGKDD, AAAI, ICDE, WWW, Ubicomp, IEEE TKDE, and ACM TWEB. These papers have been featured by top-tier press such as Technology Review and New Scientist. He has received three best paper awards from UIC'10, ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS'11, and ADMA'11 as well as a best paper nomination from Ubicomp'11. He has published two book chapters and edited one book as an editor-in-chief. He has been invited to over 30 prestigious international conferences as a chair or program committee member, including KDD, Ubicomp, IJCAI, ACM SIGSIAPTAL, PAKDD, and SSTD. He is also an editorial board member of four international journals and a frequent invited speaker. He has received three technical transfer awards from Microsoft and 20 granted/filed patents. In 2008, he was recognized as the Microsoft Golden Star. He joined MSRA in July 2006 after receiving his PhD in communication and information systems from Southwest Jiaotong University. Homepage: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/yuzheng/.

Host/Chair: Human Dynamics