Platial Analysis Lab

The lab welcomes new members

August 31, 2020

The Platial Analysis Lab is excited to welcome four new students to the team: Lauren Cater, Daniel Romm, Emily Chen, and Jonah Levitt. We are looking forward to a fun and productive year…

New CIRA funding for Location Privacy Educational Platform

June 25, 2020

We are happy to share that our research proposal to build a Location Privacy Educational Platform was selected for funding by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority…

Lab receives new funding for location privacy research

May 28, 2020

The lab is pleased to announce that we were recently awarded a grant from the Quebec government to support our continued research on location privacy…

Countries vary in place-based activity response to COVID-19 policies

May 18, 2020

We recently published a paper comparing countries based on the relationship between place-based activity patterns and government enacted policy…

Country Comparison for COVID-19 Community Mobility Response

April 11, 2020

We developed another data visualization portal for comparing country community mobility responses to COVID-19…

Interactive Graph of Canada’s COVID-19 Community Mobility

April 7, 2020

We parsed Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility PDF for Canada in order to better compare and visualize the data…

With coronavirus containment efforts, what are the privacy rights of patients?

March 18, 2020

Hongyu Zhang wrote a piece for the Conversation discussing the privacy rights of patients during a pandemic like the coronavirus…

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