News – Platial Analysis Lab

Lights Out: Examining Power Outages and Energy Equity in Quebec

January 24, 2025

Our proposal to examine power outages and vulnerability across Quebec has been selected for funding…

TRB Annual Meeting 2025

January 6, 2025

Priyanka Verma and Grant McKenzie attended the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting this year in Washington, D.C…

Reflections on the Specialist Meeting on Sociotechnical Foundations of GeoAI

November 19, 2024

In late October, Prof. McKenzie attended the Vienna specialist meeting on Sociotechnical Foundations of GeoAI…

GeoAI and Urban Mobility Analytics (AAG 2025)

November 18, 2024

For the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting next year (AAG 2025), we are organizing a paper presentation session…

Mikael Brunila successfully defends his PhD

November 3, 2024

Dr. Mikael Brunila’s PhD is entitled “Information & Meaning in the Social Sciences: Enclosure, Capital, Metaphor & Method”…

The 16th Conference on Spatial Information Theory

September 25, 2024

Professor McKenzie hosted the 16th Conference on Spatial Information Theory last week in Quebec City…

Unlocking the Power of Encrypted Geospatial Data: My Summer with Homomorphic Encryption

August 23, 2024

This summer, Siyuan Chen had the opportunity to learn about homomorphic encryption…

Zhang, Hongyu; McKenzie, Grant

Geoprivacy knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours in contemporary China Journal Article

In: Geographical Review, 2024.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Qiang, Dan; McKenzie, Grant

Navigating the Post-Pandemic Urban Landscape: Disparities in Transportation Recovery & Regional Insights from New York City Journal Article

In: Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, vol. 110, pp. 102111, 2024.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Verma, Priyanka; McKenzie, Grant

Regional Comparison of Socio-Demographic Variation in Urban E-scooter Usage Journal Article

In: Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2024.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

@article{Verma2024,

title = {Regional Comparison of Socio-Demographic Variation in Urban E-scooter Usage},

author = {Priyanka Verma and Grant McKenzie},

url = {https://grantmckenzie.com/academics/Verma_2024.pdf},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-03-26},

urldate = {2024-03-09},

journal = {Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science},

abstract = {In recent years we have witnessed explosive growth in the shared, free-floating, electric scooter industry. While still controversial in many North American cities, a number of large e-scooter operators have managed to carve out a piece of the urban transportation landscape. As these vehicles shift from novelty services to increasingly reliable modes of short personal travel, the discussion has turned to investigating who exactly benefits from these micromobility services and who are being left behind. Though population surveys have been administered to identify the socio-demographic characteristics of e-scooter riders in the past, little work has linked these characteristics through trips, or investigated the regional variation in these demographic factors. In this work we explore the variability and similarities in e-scooter rider characteristics across three major U.S. cities. To accomplish this, we apply a Moran’s Eigenvector Spatial Filtering linear regression model and compare our results to more commonly used spatial regression approaches. Our results indicate that the spatial filtering approach outperforms other methods in identifying socio-demographic characteristics of e-scooter users, across multiple regions. We find that many socio-demographics associated with e-scooter usage are regionally variant, despite younger users making up the core user base in all cities. There are variations in usage based on gender, income, and race across cities with Black and Hispanic populations remaining underserved. The implications of these findings are discussed.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

Brunila, Mikael; LaViolette, Jack; CH-Wang, Sky; Verma, Priyanka; Féré, Clara; McKenzie, Grant

Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City Best Paper Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2023), 2023.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX