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Foundations for Planning and Operations – iCity webinar series #3 of 5
June 12, 2020 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
The third in the five-webinar series presented by iCity, Foundations for Planning and Operations features three presentations.
1. Geo Semantics Exchange: Connecting Content and Providing Context – Hasan Bayanouni, Megan Katsumi, Anastassios Dardas
An increasing dilemma for geospatial analytics is the disconnect between datasets. How does a computer know that a road segment in one dataset passes through a neighbourhood in another and is close to five points of interest in a third? Moreover, how does it know if/how the neighbourhood and points of interest should be treated differently, or what the spatial relationships between them represent? While such facts can be determined with standard geoprocessing tools (e.g., intersect) and human input, the task becomes increasingly complex as the size and variety of the data increase. Our vision is to address this by enabling semantic querying within the ArcGIS Enterprise platform. Toward this, we developed the GeoSemantic Exchange (GSX), a hybrid full-stack prototype that uses data from Esri Canada’s GeoFoundation Exchange, is operated by ArcGIS Enterprise and Python, and powered by the iCity Ontologies.
Speakers
Megan Katsumi is a postdoctoral fellow with the University of Toronto Enterprise Integration Lab, and the Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) Group. She has a BASc in Industrial Engineering (Toronto), and completed her MASc and PhD with the Semantic Technologies Group at the University of Toronto where her research focused on foundations for ontology development. Currently, Megan’s research is concerned with the development of a set of ontologies and reasoning services to support city services.
Hasan Bayanouni has 13 years of experience in the ICT industry. He received his BSc in Computer Engineering from Ajman University in 2003. In 2017, he received his PhD from University of Salford, UK. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto and the team leader of ITSoS (iCity-ITSoS) project which is part of the iCity-ORF project. He is working with the Smart Freight Centre on the Freight Data Warehouse and Data Analytics Solutions.
Dr. Bayanouni worked in the industry as IT infrastructure engineer and solution architect. He led mega projects in the ICT infrastructure. He also led mega projects in the Smart Cities domain. He is focusing on the big data, data analytics, IoT Solutions and Smart Cities Solutions.
Anastassios (Tasos) Dardas is a Higher Education Developer/Analyst in the Education & Research Group at Esri Canada. He received his PhD in Geography (Health & Transport) from McMaster University and M.S. in GISciences from Clark University (USA). Before Esri Canada, Tasos worked with Hasan as a team co-lead in the ITSoS project. Now with the ontology project, his role is to conduct R&D on semantic technologies and create an application within the ArcGIS ecosystem. Aside from semantic research, Tasos is working on “big” data, data science, automated pipelines, and GeoAI related content.
2. Customizing ArcGIS for Visualization of Origin/Destination Model Outputs – Michael Leahy, Eric Miller
UTTRI’s Travel Modelling Group uses activity-based travel demand models based on the Transportation Tomorrow Survey to simulate metrics of travel between 2375 zones in the GTHA. Visualizations of the OD flows provide insight into travel demand patterns, but it is a challenge to process and visualize the origin-destination data outputs of these simulations using conventional GIS software. This presentation will discuss two custom prototypes developed by the Education and Research group at Esri Canada to enable the origin-destination travel modelling outputs to be processed and visualized efficiently and effectively in ArcGIS Pro desktop software, and on the Web browser using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript.
Speakers
Michael Leahy is a Higher Education Developer/Analyst in the Education and Research group at Esri Canada. He manages the Esri Canada GIS Centres of Excellence program, and contributes to a variety of research and development projects using Esri technologies in collaboration with researchers at universities and colleges across Canada. Michael has a PhD in Geography from Wilfrid Laurier University, and Masters of Environmental Studies from University of Waterloo.
UTTRI Director Professor Eric J. Miller is Past Chair of the U.S. Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Travel Behavior and Values, Member Emeritus of the TRB Transportation Demand Forecasting Committee and Past Chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR). He served on the US National Academy of Sciences Committee for Determination of the State of the Practice in Metropolitan Area Travel Forecasting. He has chaired or been a member of numerous travel demand modelling peer review panels throughout North America. He is the recipient of the 2009 Wilbur S. Smith Distinguished Educator Award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the inaugural winner of the University of British Columbia Margolese National Design for Living Award (2012) and recipient of the 2018 IATBR Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the developer of GTAModel, an advanced regional travel demand modeling system used by municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to forecast travel demand that is based on TASHA, a state-of-the-art agent-based microsimulation model of activity and travel, and ILUTE, an integrated land use-transportation model system for the GTA.
3. Bus Bridging Assessment Tool and Visualization Dashboard – Alaa Itani, Olufunbi Disu-Sule
Transit agencies use “bus bridging” to provide service in the event of unforeseen disruptions to rail services in many cities. A majority of agencies use improvised strategies to withdraw buses from regular routes to service the disrupted rail segment. Riders on routes from which buses are diverted may experience travel delays; the disruption may end before diverted buses are effectively deployed. The iCity Bus Bridging Dashboard, is an assessment tool agencies can use to minimize the total user delay associated with specific bus bridging plans. Researchers at the Visual Analytics Lab were tasked with creating a visualization prototype for the iCity Bus Bridging Dashboard. Using ArcGIS Operations Dashboard, the processing and handling of geospatial data and statistics is fluid. The prototype takes advantage of the ArcGIS workflow through ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online and the functionality of ArcGIS Operations Dashboard.
Speakers
Alaa Itani is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering at University of Toronto and she is currently an executive committee member of the UT-ITE student chapter. Her research interest is in planning and modelling on-demand transit in the era of new mobility and automation. Alaa holds an MASc degree from the University of Toronto where her research focused on developing a decision support toolkit for managing unplanned subway disruptions.
Olufunbi Disu-Sule is an undergraduate at Fanshawe College where he is enrolled in his fourth year of Environmental Design and Planning. He is currently a Research Assistant at OCAD-U’s Visual Analytics Lab. His research is focused on the implementation and utilization of Esri software to solve urban visualization problems.
Note: Registration closes Friday, June 12, at 10:59 a.m. and Zoom details will be forwarded to all registrants by email via Eventbrite at 11 a.m.
Click here for PDF of full webinar series agenda, speakers and registration links.
About this webinar series
This webinar series, hosted by UTTRI Executive Director Dr. Judy Farvolden, will summarize, share and celebrate the research initiatives and innovations produced over the course of the project, wrapping up with a preview of research proposed for iCity 2.0.
The online presentations are scheduled over five days as shown below. Admission is free and all are welcome. Registration for each webinar is required.
– June 8, 2020, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.: Ontologies and Platforms
– June 10, 2020, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.: Visualization
– June 12, 2020, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.: Foundations for Planning and Operations
– June 15, 2020, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.: Elements of the Street and its Users
– June 17, 2020, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.: The Long View and Next Steps
Details and registration links for all webinars
About iCity: Urban Informatics for Sustainable Metropolitan Growth
The iCity: Urban Informatics for Sustainable Metropolitan Growth project is coming to a close after five years of successful collaboration between UTTRI, OCAD-U and University of Waterloo. Led by Principal Investigator and UTTRI Director, Dr. Eric Miller, the goal of iCity was to find innovative ways to improve urban transportation system performance and design efficient, sustainable cities for the well-being of individuals and society.
iCity researchers co-created innovative ways to improve urban transportation system performance through the design of complete streets, understanding parking behaviour, improving transit resilience, exploring the behaviours of pedestrians, and extending our understanding of the interactions between land use and transportation. Rigorous transportation research, built on a foundation of data, ontologies and platforms was effectively enabled by novel visualizations, resulting in a suite of data standards, dashboards and tools we hope will be useful to our iCity partners and others.
iCity: Urban Informatics for Sustainable Metropolitan Growth is funded by the Ontario Research Fund, Research Excellence, Round 7.