Urban Computing-Using Big Data to Solve Urban Challenges

Speaker:        Dr. Yu Zheng
                Lead Researcher
                Microsoft Research

Title:          "Urban Computing-Using Big Data to Solve Urban Challenges"

Date:           Thursday, 27 March 2014

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater H (near lifts 27/28), HKUST

Abstract:

Urban computing is a process of acquisition, integration, and analysis of
big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban
spaces, such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human, to
tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g. air pollution, increased
energy consumption and traffic congestion. Urban computing connects
unobtrusive and ubiquitous sensing technologies, advanced data management
and analytics models, and novel visualization methods, to create
win-win-win solutions that improve urban environment, human life quality,
and city operation systems. In this talk, we will present our recent
research into urban computing, introducing the applications and
technologies for integrating and deep mining heterogeneous data. Examples
include large-scale dynamic ridesharing, identifying different functional
regions (e.g., residential and commercial areas) in urban spaces, crowd
sending city-wide gas consumption, and fine-grained air quality inference
throughout a city. These examples have been published in top-tier
conferences and journals recently, such as KDD, UbiComp, ICDE. More
details can be found on:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/urbancomputing/


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Biography:

Dr. Yu ZHENG is a lead researcher from Microsoft Research in Beijing. He
is also a visiting Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and an
adjunct professor at Southwest Jiaotong University.  He is passionate
about using big and heterogeneous data generated in urban spaces to tackle
the big challenges that cities face, such as transportation, pollution,
and energy. He has published over 50 referred papers as a leading
author at quality conferences and journals, such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE,
SIGKDD, AAAI, WWW, UbiComp, and IEEE TKDE, where he received 4 best paper
awards and 1 best paper nominee. His research has been featured multiple
times by top-tier presses, like MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, and
Time Magazine. Zheng has been serving over 30 prestigious international
conferences as a chair or program committee member, such as the program
co-chair of ICDE2014 (industrial track). He is currently a member
of Editorial Advisory Board of IEEE Spectrum and an associate editor
of GeoInformatica and journal on location-based services. He has been
invited to give keynote speeches at international conferences,
e.g. IE2014, and ISKE2013, and guest lectures in universities like MIT,
CMU, and Cornell. His book, titled "Computing with Spatial Trajectories",
has been used as a text book in USA, Canada, Australia, Korea, and
China. Zheng has received 3 technical transfer awards from Microsoft and
22 granted/filed patents. In 2008, he was recognized as the Microsoft
Golden Star.  He is an IEEE senior member, ACM senior member, and a
Distinguished Speaker of China Computer Federation. In 2013, he
was named Top Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review (TR35) for his
research using data sciences to solve urban challenges. He was also
featured by Time Magazine due to his research on urban computing in Nov
2013. More details can be found on his homepage:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/yuzheng/