Good System Speaker Series: Ethics and Responsible Innovation in Data-Intensive Smart Cities and Urban Mobility Management

Data and information technology have transformed our daily lives and have reshaped the ways in which cities and transportation systems are governed and operated. But too often, urban and mobility analytics is couched narrowly in terms of resource optimization and management on the one hand, and privacy and surveillance on the other. While efficiency and data protection are essential criteria in delivering urban services, there is a need to ensure that data-driven tools and technologies contribute to social justice and are not used to harm vulnerable populations. Currently, there is an increasing focus on bias and algorithmic justice with the aim of steering data-driven systems towards fairness-by-design, data democracy, and data justice, across a wide spectrum of data-driven technology (big data, AI, machine learning). These are consequential future directions since inadequate data and misspecified and myopic algorithms can cause harm and reinforce existing inequities. Using heterogeneous sources of structured and unstructured data in the context of contested streets and uneven transportation access, the talk will highlight the technological, methodological, and epistemological pillars of data-intensive smart city and urban mobility systems, with an emphasis on the power dynamics and political economy of urban data production, and the unintended consequences and governance challenges associated with such systems.

Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah is a Distinguished Professor in Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Director of the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics (RUCI) Lab. Her research interests are in transportation planning and operations; big data, urban informatics, and social and economic cyberinfrastructure; and the social equity and data justice aspects of data, AI and automation. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, European Commission, UK Research and Innovation, U.S. Department of Transportation, and other sponsors. She has delivered keynote addresses and plenaries at prominent international and national venues such as the such as National Academy of Sciences, European Commission (Brussels and Luxembourg), the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, and the Leibnitz Center for Informatics in Germany. She was the (founding) director and Principal Investigator of the Urban Big Data Centre, a multimillion-dollar consortium funded by UK Research and Innovation that was responsible for providing a UK-wide urban big data infrastructure. Vonu was previously the Ch2M Endowed Chair Professor of Transport in the University of Glasgow, UK, and a European Commission Marie Curie Fellow. Her postdoctoral fellowship was supported by NSF’s DMS at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.

 

 

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