abstract: Factors that explain human mobility and active transportation include built environment and infrastructure features, though few studies incorporate specific geographic detail into examinations of mobility. Little is understood, for example, about the specific paths people take in urban areas or the influence of neighborhoods on their activity. Detailed analysis of human activity has been limited by the sampling strategies employed by conventional data sources. New crowdsourced datasets, or data gathered from smartphone applications, present an opportunity to examine factors that influence human activity in ways that have not been possible before; they typically contain more detail and are gathered more frequently than conventional sources. Questions remain, however, about the utility and representativeness of crowdsourced data. The overarching aim of this dissertation research is to identify how crowdsourced data can be used to better understand human mobility. Bicycling activity is used as a case study to examine human mobility because smartphone apps aimed at collecting bicycle routes are readily available and bicycling is under studied in comparison to other modes. The research herein aimed to contribute to the knowledge base on crowdsourced data and human mobility in three ways. First, the research examines how conventional (e.g., counts, travel surveys) and crowdsourced data correspond in representing bicycling activity. Results identified where the data correspond and differ significantly, which has implications for using crowdsourced data for planning and policy decisions. Second, the research examined the factors that influence cycling activity generated by smartphone cycling apps. The best predictors of activity were median weekly rent, percentage of residential land, and the number of people using two or more modes to commute in an area. Finally, the third part of the dissertation seeks to understand the impact of bicycle lanes and bicycle ridership on residential housing prices. Results confirmed that bicycle lanes in the neighborhood of a home positively influence sale prices, though ridership was marginally related to house price. This research demonstrates that knowledge obtained through crowdsourced data informs us about smaller geographic areas and details on where people bicycle, who uses bicycles, and the impact of the built environment on bicycling activity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2018

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are essential tools for traffic planning, analysis, and forecasting that can utilize the huge amount of traffic data available nowadays. In this work, we aggregated detailed traffic flow sensor data, Waze reports, OpenStreetMap (OSM) features, and weather data, from California Bay Area for 6 months. Using that data, we studied three novel ITS applications using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The first experiment is an analysis of the relation between roadway shapes and accident occurrence, where results show that the speed limit and number of lanes are significant predictors for major accidents on highways. The second experiment presents a novel method for forecasting congestion severity using crowdsourced data only (Waze, OSM, and weather), without the need for traffic sensor data. The third experiment studies the improvement of traffic flow forecasting using accidents, number of lanes, weather, and time-related features, where results show significant performance improvements when the additional features where used.

This thesis analyzes the end-user quality of service (QoS) in cellular mobile networks using device-side measurements. Quality of service in a wireless network is a significant factor in determining a user's satisfaction. Customers' perception of poor QoS is one of the core sources of customer churn for telecommunications companies. A core focus of this work is on assessing how user density impacts QoS within cellular networks. Kernel density estimation is used to produce user density estimates for high, medium, and low density areas. The QoS distributions are then compared across these areas. The k-sample Anderson-Darling test is used to determine the degree to which user densities vary over time. In general, it is shown that users in higher density areas tend to experience overall lower QoS levels than those in lower density areas, even though these higher density areas service more subscribers. The conducted analyses highlight the value of mobile device-side QoS measurements in augmenting traditional network-side QoS measurements. / Graduate

Excerpt: Time and expense are perhaps the two biggest challenges in evaluating existing measures and devoloping new metrics. Measuring social characterists of a population such as religion typically involves expensive surveys undertaken by professional survey firms or academic centers.

Exploring upon the phenomena of smart cities, this paper elaborates the potential of crowdsourced data collection in small scale urban quarters. The development of the Data4City (D4C) hyperlocal app – PinCity – is based on the idea of increasing the density of real-time information in urban areas (urban neighborhoods) in order to optimize or create innovative urban services (such as public transportation, garbage collection) or urban planning, thus improving the quality of life of quarter inhabitants as a long-term goal. The main principle of the app is the small-scale implementation, as opposed to top-down smart city approaches worldwide, preferably in a city quarter, or a community, which can be subsequently scaled and interlaced to other parts of the city.