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Is the Internet of Things the right technology to further our understanding of human mobility?

Dr. Monica Wachowicz

Cisco Innovation Chair in Big Data and NSERC/Cisco IRC in Real-Time Mobility Analytics, University of New Brunswick

January 27, 2017 11:00 - 12:30

Herzberg Laboratories Building Room 5345, Carleton University

 

 

abstract

Almost any object, in any sector, in any location could potentially join the Internet of Things (IoT). Billions of objects are already being filled with sensors of various kinds, and the next leap is to think how people will interact with the larger IoT world including wearables, homes, factory floors, cars and the unforeseen categories of devices of the future. In particular, IoT devices will be carried by us, or might be following us, or will be embedded in our surrounding environments. Society has a very ambitious vision of living in large-scale, smart, and interconnected cities, but it is still very challenging to develop realistic assumptions about how people will interact with both physical and virtual worlds of the Internet of Things and as a result, to predict how human mobility behavior will be affected by this change. This talk is an attempt to shed some light on the consequences of this technology to further our understanding of human mobility behavior in smart cities. Its impact on streaming analytics, from developing analytical measures to using reliable data structures and meaningful conceptual models that ultimately can lead to new insights about human mobility behavior will be discussed.

biography

Dr. Monica Wachowicz is Associate Professor and the Cisco Innovation Chair in Big Data Analytics and the NSERC/Cisco Industrial Research Chair in Real-Time Mobility Analytics at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. She is also the Director of the People in Motion Laboratory, a centre of expertise in the application of Internet of Things (IoT) to smart cities. Her research work is directly related to the vision of a constellation of inter-connected devices in the future that will contain information about the context and location of things across several geographical and temporal scales. She works at the intersection of (1) Streaming Analytics for analyzing massive IoT data in search of valuable spatio-temporal patterns in real-time; and (2) Art, Cartography, and Representations of mobility for making the maps of the future which will be culturally and linguistically designed to provide a greater "sense of people" in motion. Founding member of the IEEE Big Data Initiative and the International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, she is also joint Editor-in-Chief of the Cartographica Journal. Her pioneering work in multidisciplinary teams from government, industry and research organizations is fostering the next generation of data scientists for innovation.