With modern-day cities come vast quantities of data from online activities that reflect how people interact with the urban environment and with each other. The Social Urban Data Lab (SUDL) works at the leading edge of urban analytics to make sense of these data and to maximize their value. The SUDL team develops state-of-the-art computational methods and tools that facilitate a better understanding of city dynamics and inform urban planning and policy making. Emphasis is on data-driven approaches with the goal of characterizing places and people’s activities, experiences and interactions.
SUDL offers unique insights into the understanding of cities and metropolitan regions by benefiting from expertise in geographic information retrieval, spatiotemporal analysis, machine learning and urban planning. The Lab’s primary goal is to support the community of city stakeholders in general and the AMS Principal Investigators and researchers in particular through research, education and consultancy on data-driven approaches to urban analytics and planning.
The Lab’s researchers and engineers seek to facilitate the use of urban information by both domain experts and the wider community. To this end, SUDL has developed online systems and urban analytics toolkits. A prominent example is SocialGlass, which enables the integration of online data about cities and offers improved insight into human and place dynamics.
SUDL contributes to the education efforts of AMS Institute through cutting-edge coursework, which emphasizes advanced spatiotemporal analysis, geocomputation and geographic information retrieval. In the context of this educational outreach portfolio, SUDL has organized the 1st European Seminar on Urban Data Science in 2017. The Lab’s activities are further disseminated through public demonstrations at both scientific institutions and policy organizations.
The Social Urban Data Lab was established in 2016 and is led by Dr. Achilleas Psyllidis