Managing and Making Sense of Big Data From Urban Networks

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                        Joint Seminar
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Department of Mathematics
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
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Speaker:        Dr. Yanhua Li
                Computer Science and Engineering Department
                University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Title:          "Managing and Making Sense of Big Data From Urban
                 Networks"

Date:           Wednesday, 7 Jan 2015

Time:           3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:          Room 4472 (via lifts 25/26), HKUST


ABSTRACT:

Urban networks generate a vast range of big data every day, including human 
mobility, vehicle trajectory, air quality, regional weather, etc. It is 
challenging how to manage and integrate all these data sources to perform 
urban sensing, data management, data analytic in improving peoples life 
quality, city operation systems, and the environment. In this talk, I 
present two works of mine in managing and making sense of big data from 
urban networks. A trajectory aggregate query, as a fundamental 
functionality for measuring urban trajectory data, aims to retrieve the 
statistics of trajectories passing a user-specified spatio-temporal region. 
The first work introduces random index sampling framework, that provides 
approximate answer to trajectory aggregate queries, with guaranteed error 
bound. In the second work, by analyzing a large-scale electric taxi 
trajectory data, we investigate an emerging and challenging question to 
urban planners and electric utility companies, namely, how to strategically 
deploy the charging stations and charging points in an urban area to 
minimize the average time to the nearest charging station, and the average 
waiting time for an available charging point.


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Biography:

Yanhua Li is a Post-Doctoral Researcher with Computer Science and 
Engineering Department at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He obtained 
two PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from 
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2013, and Beijing University of 
Posts and Telecommunications in 2009. His broad research interests are in 
analyzing, understanding, and making sense of big data generated from 
various complex networks in many contexts. His specific interests include 
large-scale network data sampling, measurement, urban network analysis, 
online social behavior modeling, and spatio-temporal data analytics. He has 
worked as a researcher at HUAWEI Noah's Ark LAB at Hong Kong from Aug 2013 
to Dec 2014, and has interned in Bell Labs in New Jersey, Microsoft 
Research Asia, and HUAWEI research labs of America from 2011 to 2013. His 
work has been published by top conferences and journals in both networking 
and data mining areas, such as ICDE, INFOCOM, ICDCS, WSDM, IMC, IEEE TSC, 
IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TPDS, etc. He served on TPC of INFOCOM 2015, ICDCS 2014, 
2015, and he is the co-chair of SIMPLEX 2015.