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Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science

Worcester Plytechnic Institute

Managing and Making Sense of Big Data From Urban Networks

Abstract: The urban network infrastructure has undergone a fast development and expansion over recent years, which increasingly generates an immense amount of big data, such as human mobility data, human transaction data, regional weather data, and etc. These heterogeneous urban network data bring new
challenges in data management, and convey rich information about a city and can enable intelligent
solutions to solve various urban challenges, such as urban facility planning, air pollution, etc. In this talk, I
present my work on managing and analyzing these urban network data that enable smart city operation
systems and improve peoples' life quality. Going beyond the existing fixed route model in public transits
and point‐to‐point model in private transits, the first work introduces a hybrid hub‐&‐spoke transit system
for urban transportation, that requires less routes than private transits, thus improves the efficiency of
using transportation resources and increase the occupation rate; and it requires less stops/transfers than existing public transits to save on trip time. In the second work, by analyzing a large‐scale electric taxi
trajectory data, I 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.

Biography: Yanhua Li is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Data Science
Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Before joining WPI, Dr. Li worked as a Post‐Doctoral
Researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities, and worked as a researcher in HUAWEI Noah's Ark LAB at Hong Kong. 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 smart cities,
data‐driven cyber‐physical systems (CPS), and urban computing. Dr. Li has held visiting positions in Bell Labs in New Jersey, Microsoft Research Asia, and HUAWEI
research labs of America. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.