[CSEE Talk] talk: Visual Exploration of Big Urban Data, Noon 3/12, ITE325b, UMBC

[Tim Finin]

              Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
                University of Maryland, Baltimore County

                  Visual Exploration of Big Urban Data

                               Dr. Huy Yo
       Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University

             12:00-1:00pm Thursday, 12 March 2015, ITE 325b


About half of humanity lives in urban environments today and that
number will grow to 80% by the middle of this century. Cities are
thus the loci of resource consumption, of economic activity, and
of innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability
problems but also where those problems must be solved. Data,
along with visualization and analytics can help significantly in
finding these solutions.

In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of visual exploration
of big urban data; and showcase our approaches in a study of New
York City taxi trips. Taxis are valuable sensors and can provide
unprecedented insight into many different aspects of city
life. But analyzing these data presents many challenges. The data
are complex, containing geographical and temporal components in
addition to multiple variables associated with each
trip. Consequently, it is hard to specify exploratory queries and
to perform comparative analyses. This problem is largely due to
the size of the data. There are almost a billion records of taxi
trips collected in a 5-year period. I will present TaxiVis, a
tool that allows domain experts to visually query taxi trips at
an interactive speed and performing tasks that were unattainable
before. I will also discuss our key contributions in this work:
the visual querying model and novel indexing scheme for
spatio-temporal datasets.


Dr. Huy Vo (http://serv.cusp.nyu.edu/~hvo/) is a Research
Scientist at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP),
New York University. His research focuses on large-scale data
analysis and visualization, big data systems, and scalable
displays. He is also a Research Assistant Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering at NYU's Polytechnic School of
Engineering since 2011. He is one of the co-creators of
VisTrails, an open-source scientific workflow and provenance
management system, where he led the design of the VisTrails
Provenance SDK. He received his B.S. in Computer Science (2005)
and PhD in Computing (2011) from the University of Utah and was a
two time recipient of the NVIDIA Fellowship awards (2009-2010 and
2010-2011).

Host: Jian CHen

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