Today we are having Dani Arribas-Bel (Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool) presenting a seminar at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). Daniel (website, Twitter) will be talking about his research agenda on "Infusing Urban and Regional policy with Geographic Data Science". The seminar will start at 3pm (local time). My apologies this post comes in short notice. This week has been hectic.
Daniel is part of the development team of PySAL and he is a prolific researcher and also a great enthusiast of open data/software and research reproducibility. In fact, many of his papers (code and data) and teaching material are available on his Github repo.
Summary of the presentation:
The recent explosion in availability of new forms of data poses significant opportunities to how we analyse cities and regions, both in academic and policy contexts. Over the last decade, three families of data have emerged in this context. One is digital traces of individual activity. From credit card transactions, to mobile phone calls, to thoughts and feelings we decide to share through social media, more and more bits of our life are being stored digitally as data that a computer can understand. The second comes from an increasing number of sensors, from traffic controllers to nano-satellites orbiting the Earth, which are constantly recording information about the environment. The third one has existed for longer but has not been available until recently: a few years ago, governments started releasing data on their internal operations that used to be parked in (closed) silos. This presentation will walk through several examples where new forms of data are applied to tackle new questions or obtain new perspectives on long-standing challenges of regional and urban analysis. As part of this whirlwind tour, we will also spend some time trying to understand what the main challenges, methodological advances, and risks that "accidental data” pose are, and will emphasise the tremendous opportunities they unleash.
credit: Dani Arribas-Bel
