Speaker: Andreas Züfle, Assistant Professor with the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University
Title: Engineering Uncertain Heterogeneous Spatial Data for Traffic Prediction
Abstract: In the current data-centered era, there are many highly diverse data sources that provide information about movement on transportation networks, such as GPS trajectories, geo-social movement trajectories, and traffic flow measurements. This seminar talk gives on overview of a NSF-funded project to build a unified framework for aggregating and analyzing diverse and uncertain movement data on such networks. The vision is to unify traffic information from from road traffic, public transport, bike sharing services, social media, and other sources into a single framework to model the flow of people. A main challenge of this project is to cope with various level of uncertainty: Some data sources may be inherently fuzzy, some may suffer from infrequent location updates, and some may be deliberately obfuscated to preserve user-privacy. Applications for such framework range from geomarketing to disaster and emergency management. This seminar will show techniques for managing uncertain spatial and spatio-temporal data, and will show first project results on real-world data.
Bio: Since 2016, Andreas Züfle is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University (GMU). In 2013, Andreas received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at LMU Munich. Andreas’ research expertise includes big spatial data, spatial data mining, social network mining, and uncertain database management. His research quest is to work interdisciplinary and bridge the gap between data-science and geo-science, two fields working independently on often identical research problems. Since 2016, Andreas research has received more than $500,000 in research grants by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and has just received a $1,500,000 grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2018. Since 2011, Dr. Züfle has published more than 80 papers in refereed conferences and journals having an h-index of 16 with more than a thousand citations.