Platial Analysis Lab

Presentation to the MTL Machine Learning Group

April 18, 2019

Last week Grant McKenzie presented a talk entitled “A machine learning approach to identifying urban neighborhood names” at the Montreal Machine Learning Group meetup in downtown Montreal. Check out the video below.

Platial at the Annual AAG Meeting in D.C.

April 10, 2019

Another American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting has come to a close, this time in Washington, D.C. By all accounts the meeting was a success and it is always great to catch up with spatial scientists in their natural habitat.

Montreal Building Footprints

March 8, 2019

Microsoft just recently published their Building Footprints dataset for Canada. A quick analysis of the coverage for the Island of Montreal shows that there are considerable differences…

Spatial Knowledge and Information Canada Conference 2019

February 25, 2019

The 7th Conference on Spatial Knowledge and Information Canada (SKI-Canada) just wrapped up in beautiful Banff, Alberta.

New publication on predicting financial access in sub-Saharan Africa

February 21, 2019

The recent increase in user-generated content and social media adoption in developing countries offers an unprecedented opportunity to better understand the accessibility and spatial distribution of financial services in sub-Saharan Africa.

Social Statistics & Population Dynamics Talk

January 16, 2019

Grant will be giving a talk titled “Platial Dynamics: Activity exploration through digital exhaust” at McGill’s Center for Population Dynamics on February 6th.

Join the Lab! Masters and PhD Opportunities

November 9, 2018

The Platial Analysis Lab is currently accepting applications for funded graduate research from motivated students at the Masters and PhD levels.

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