From Biases to Opportunities: Leveraging Location-Based-Service (LBS) Data for Advancing Smart Mobility
SPEAKER Prof. Cynthia Chen
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and
Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
University of Washington (UW)
Member of Washington State Academy of Sciences ​ DATE AND TIME 11 DEC 2025, 7 pm -8 pm
Venue
CPD 3.04 (Central Podium Levels - Three), Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong ORGANISED BY Institute of Transport Studies, The University of Hong Kong ​
REGISTRATION LINK
ABSTRACT Location-Based Service (LBS) data, generated from the mobile devices that now accompany people everywhere, holds immense promise for advancing smart mobility. With its ability to provide continuous, large-scale insights into travel patterns, LBS data can transform how we collect information, develop models, and design policies for more efficient, equitable, and sustainable mobility systems. Yet this potential is constrained by persistent challenges—particularly the lack of transparency among researchers, transportation professionals, and LBS vendors, as well as data quality biases that limit reliability.
This talk first highlights the opportunities of LBS data to enable smart mobility planning, from dynamic demand forecasting to creating adaptive infrastructure capacity. I then examine key biases and quality issues in LBS data and their impact on critical mobility metrics used for planning. Addressing these challenges requires collective action: fusing small-scale (Household Travel Survey) and large-scale (LBS) data to create privacy-aware mobility digital twins; applying anomaly and changepoint detection to trace the evolution of behavioral and network-level changes; and uncovering hidden capacities in infrastructure systems. Finally, I outline pathways for collaboration across the research, practitioner, and vendor communities to establish benchmark datasets, trip inference standards, and privacy safeguards—all essential to unleashing the full potential of LBS data in driving the future of smart mobility. BIOS Cynthia Chen is a professor in the Departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. An internationally recognized leader in transportation science, she directs the THINK (Transportation–Human Interaction and Network Knowledge) Lab at UW. Her research tackles some of the most pressing challenges in mobility and resilience: uncovering biases in big data, developing innovative methods to fuse large-scale and small-scale data sources, modeling mobility behaviors of individuals and cascading processes in networks, and designing interventions that promote healthier, more resilient communities through routine-aware personalized recommendations and place-based peer-to-peer sharing.
Prof. Chen’s scholarship is widely published in top journals across transportation systems engineering, travel behavior, land use planning, and interdisciplinary venues such as PNAS and Nature Cities. Her work has been supported by numerous federal, state, and local agencies. Currently, she serves as Associate Director of the USDOT-funded National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand (led by UT Austin) and as an Associate Editor for Transportation Science.
Through the THINK Lab, Prof. Chen continues to push the boundaries of how we understand human mobility, networks, and resilience in the face of social and environmental change. More about her work can be found at https://sites.uw.edu/thinklab.
