The type of scientific work we are offering

As a potential host of STSM for COST TU 1305, we can offer two lines of research for cooperation and collaboration with interested researchers. The first is about travel behavior, with which we have developed the concept of street hierarchy and agent-based simulations for study how human mobility is mainly (say 60%) shaped by the underlying street hierarchy. All data and source codes are sharable at the website: http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/movingbehavior/

 With the first line of research, we are interested in incorporation of human behavior and their socio-economic factors into the existing models in order to raise prediction rates.

The second line of research is about geospatial analysis and visualization of data harvested from social media such as Flickr and Twitter. We have developed the concept of natural cities, and visualized their structure and dynamics under the paradigm of fractal geometry.

Jiang B. (2015), Head/tail breaks for visualization of city structure and dynamics, Cities, 43, 69-77.

Jiang B. and Miao Y. (2014), The evolution of natural cities from the perspective of location-based social

media, The Professional Geographer, xx(xx), xx-xx, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2014.968886, Preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6756

With the second line of research, we look forward to analysis and visualization of the social media data at a city scale in order to extract and track hotspots such as city centers and train stations, and their changes in space and over time. We have tweets location data at the global scale, and for some big countries such as USA, UK, France, and Germany. We have also put our studied data online at https://sites.google.com/site/naturalcitiesdata/

We have very rich research experiences in social network analysis such as small world and scale free modeling. In this regard, we have a widely used research prototype namely Axwoman for topological analysis of street networks: http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/axwoman/

Possible duration of STSM

5 working days minimum, and up to three months

The best time to host STSM in this institution

All year around