In 2013, £913m of funds was allocated over 10 years for investment in London’s cycling infrastructure. Much of this — including guided quietways, protected cycle superhighways and London’s crossrail for the bike — opened in summer 2016. The chief objective: to make cycling ‘a normal part of everyday life  […] something people hardly think about […]

Cycling has the potential to tackle multiple interrelated problems including sedentary lifestyles and the associated obesity crisis, air pollution and road traffic congestion. In recognition of its benefits for the environment, society and economy, Government aims to double cycling by 2025 (Department for Transport 2017). To do so depends on a number of interventions, including […]

The aim of this project is to develop a computational and mathematical framework for data assimilation using agent-based models (ABMs), which integrates data emerging from smart cities (e.g. traffic counters, social media activity, environment sensors, etc.) into large-scale urban simulations in real time. Socio-economic systems, where individuals’ behaviour is dependent on the actions and interactions […]

Clinical trials are run by pharmaceutical companies (and elsewhere) in order to test the efficacy of new drugs and/or treatment regimes. Sharing such data for research use by third parties is regarded as good scientific practice as it allows meta-analysis, replication studies and so forth. It also promotes transparency; and indeed pharmaceutical companies are now […]

An oversimplification of the interpretation of analytical results in forensic testing can frequently lead to inconclusive or misleading evidence and thus miscarriages of justice. A more robust approach would take a holistic view on this based on a range of individual pieces of information including data from questionnaires and physically obtained measurements of different sample […]

Metropolitan areas are functional structures that arise from the interactions of multiple agents, from institutions to business and individual citizens. These interactions occur under a set of different agendas that combine the agents’ behaviours with the policy frameworks in which they operate. Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) is a new institutional setting with devolved powers […]

The rapid change in technology we are experiencing in cities across the world, and the associated rise of flexible travel modes and new technology services, now called MaaS (mobility as a service), are challenging the ways city authorities plan for the future. The models and data we use for this planning process haven’t really changed […]

More than 100 million passengers per year enter the UK by air, sea and rail. There are dozens of ports each with their own unique characteristics. Border Force play a vital role in protecting security and preventing crime, including high harm activity such as human trafficking. This they must do while minimising the impediment to […]

This project will explore the potential for linking food purchase data with food intake measures and health data. Poor dietary habits place major health, social and economic burdens on societies. In addition to direct relationships between the nutritional quality of the diet and health; we also plan to explore associations with environmental sustainability. This project […]

This project aims to create new knowledge and understanding about the drivers of obesity and engagement in weight management programmes. These factors need to be brought together within an integrated framework: the primary objective of this PhD is to use agent-based modelling to simulate environmental, behavioural, economic and social determinants of obesity and engagement in […]

Characteristics of the form, function and dynamics of cities are increasingly captured by an array of big data. When supplemented with emerging geographic data science methodologies, these data sources can provide new lenses through which an urban analysts can study the complexity of cities. The concept of human weather focuses on  those high-volume data streams […]

Violence in the night-time economy (NTE) remains a key challenge for policing. To date, accurate estimates of the relative risk of violence in town and city centres have been limited due to insufficient reliable information on the transient population in these areas. Moreover, attempts to leverage quantitative methods to better understand the such violence (often […]

This project will leverage recent advances on the collection and processing of data obtained through citizen sensing from a variety of sources and explore their usefulness to understand cities. These sources include the Internet of things (IoT) systems such as wearables (wireless devices that can be carried on by human body) carried by individuals, as […]

The last few years have seen a radical increase in the amount of non-traditional data sources that can be used to enhance traffic safety. These include cameras located at intersections that can understand the traffic condition and accidents ‘identification. Leveraging the most recent technologies and algorithms, including AI, this project will explore how different types […]

This project will utilise a variety of machine learning techniques to consolidate a global database of retailer locations, develop new centre definitions and contextualise these through various ancillary sources including the combination of imagery (street level, aerial, satellite), LIDAR, administrative data and global retailer’s internal data. Reference number LV21b Apply online here Get in touch […]

This project will explore the linkage of global census data for small area geography, developing both data fusion and synthetic estimation techniques that might be applied to generate micro level socio-economic attributes at a small area level of geography for different global contexts. Reference number LV21a Apply online here Get in touch with the supervisor

  West Midlands Police, through their Data Driven Insights programme, have recently developed an analytics lab to bring together a wide range of policing data sources and provide a big-data platform upon which advanced mathematical and statistical techniques can be applied to the data. This concept has been developed to assist WMP to deliver its […]

External partner Dubit, a strategy, research and development company focused on digital media and content for children, produces unique reports on children’s global media usage through its ‘Dubit Trends’ media tracker. This is a large-scale survey that looks at how children around the world are using a range of media and content. This PhD project […]

For road safety engineering schemes and infrastructure investment the cost of road traffic casualties is an important metric. Many safety schemes are evaluated on the basis of first year rates of return that multiply the projected reduction by the specified cost per casualty. The effect is that millions of pounds of public funding is planned […]

Strategic roads are vital to the economic success of Britain and the economy suffers when this network is compromised by traffic jams and collisions. Despite the availability of minute-by-minute data for vehicle speeds on the UK’s strategic roads, there has been little analysis of the associated risks arising from changes in traffic flow and vehicle […]

The Alan Turing Institute and The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) are seeking to recruit four doctoral students to work on PhD projects in the priority areas of smart cities and health and well-being.  Two of these studentships will be registered at the University of Leeds, with the Centre for Data Analytics and Society. Studying at the […]

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