Abstract: Cities are the central engines of productivity, innovation, and cultural diversity, owing to their ability to foster dense social and economic connections among people and organizations. However, cities are also at the forefront of unprecedented challenges, including increased frequency of climate change induced disasters, aging infrastructure systems, and growing inequality and segregation. To build urban resilience to such challenges, we need to better understand the cascading socioeconomic impacts of shocks, which are undergirded by complex interdependencies between social networks, urban environments, and online systems. Leveraging the increasing availability of large-scale human behavior data collected from mobile devices (e.g., mobile phone GPS, social media, web search) I study the resilience of urban sociotechnical systems using a data-driven complex systems dynamics approach. In this talk, I will particularly focus on research on 1) resilience of cities to disasters, focusing on the impacts of complex interdependencies between social dynamics and infrastructure systems (based on papers in PNAS and Sustainable Cities and Society), and 2) resilience of the diversity of urban social contact networks during the pandemic (arXiv preprint available).

Bio: Taka is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and Media Lab mentored by Alex 'Sandy' Pentland and Esteban Moro. Taka’s research lies in the intersections of civil engineering, computational social science, and urban science. His research develops data-driven urban sociotechnical system models for analyzing large-scale human behavior data, to better understand collective social dynamics during disruptions, and to improve the resilience of communities and cities to urban shocks. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, advised by Satish V. Ukkusuri, and his Masters and Bachelor Degrees from the University of Tokyo. Taka is also passionate in transforming research to policy, and previously was a Data Science Consultant for the World Bank, working on human mobility data analytics for urban disaster risk management and transportation resilience modeling.


More details & Zoom Meeting information at: https://www.dins.pitt.edu/dins-seminar-series-2022-23

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