Special Issue of Transportation on EMERGING, PASSIVELY GENERATED DATASETS FOR TRAVEL BEHAVIOR AND POLICY ANALYSIS

The rapid rise of social media tools combined with location-aware sensors has made the collection of passive data possible. Unlike traditional, purpose-designed and actively collected travel survey data, which attempts to record every trip made by a respondent during a certain time period (e.g., 24 hours) so that activity locations such as home locations and work places are known, these passively collected datasets typically only contain sightings that may suggest locations visited. Furthermore, such datasets do not readily contain important variables for travel behavior and policy analysis such as socio-demographic and economic factors. The recent availability of these new, emerging passive data sources has motivated a surge of studies on human mobility and its implications in the use of space, social relationships, and location-based services. Few studies, however, have been conducted to answer questions directly relevant to travel behavior and policy analysis. New statist!
ical methods are needed to process and analyze such large, noisy datasets and integrate them with other datasets of different temporal and spatial scales and/or containing important variables (such as census data with socio-demographics).

Guest Editors

Cynthia Chen, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, USA. [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Michael Batty, Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London, London. [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Tom van Vuren (Editorial Board Transportation), Mott MacDonald, Birmingham, UK. [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Schedule

Submission of abstracts: January 15, 2014
Invitation of full papers: February 15, 2014
Submission of full papers: May 15, 2014
Feedback of first-round reviews: August 15, 2014
Revised manuscripts due: November 15, 2014

Feedback from second-round reviews issued (if need be): December 30, 2014

Final manuscripts due: January 30, 2015

Planned publication: 2015

Coverage
With this call for papers, we encourage submissions that use the new, emerging passive datasets and apply innovative methods on such datasets for an improved understanding of travel behavior and policy analysis. We also welcome methodological papers discussing how such data can best be analyzed and merged with other sources, dealing with bias in the sample, and lack of traditional variables.  Finally, we seek papers exploring how these datasets have been or can be used for transportation policy and transportation system planning and management purposes, including the limitations on the use of this data. We particularly welcome joint submissions from within and outside the transportation research community.

Papers responding to this call must either use such datasets or discuss the use of such datasets. Contributions may be made in one or more aspects of the following:
• Improving our understanding in human mobility patterns
• Improving our understanding of the built environment we live in
• Improving our understanding of human-nature relationships
• Improving our understanding of social relationships
• For better policy making, for better transportation system planning and management purposes
• Methodological contributions

Abstract
The abstract needs to be sufficiently detailed to enable the Guest Editors to determine whether it is likely to be a precursor of an acceptable, within scope, paper.  It will typically be at least 500 words long, but not more than 1,000.

Authors
Please provide information on the authors(s) including affiliation(s), position(s), and research interests.

Submission method
All submissions shall be sent to Cynthia Chen by email and go through a normal peer review process.

Inquires
Inquires about this call for paper may be sent to any of the guest editors.

____________________________
Michael Batty
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)
University College London
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1N 6TR
Tel 44-(0)20 3108 3877 Cell 44-(0)7768 423 656
http://www.complexcity.info/
t @jmichaelbatty