Automating Travel Surveys

Abstract: Travel surveys are used to estimate the percentage of citizen using certain mode(s) of transport, and are the basic building block towards data-driven transport policies. Traditionally, travel surveys are done on paper or with telephone assistance, a costly and cumbersome approach that limits the number of times the survey can be applied. The advent of ubiquitous Smartphones opened the door for the implementation of travel surveys as a mobile app that (i) collects relevant sensor data (ii) uses Machine Learning models to detect the transportation mode, and (iii) interface with the user to verify the machine's prediction, correcting it if necessary. In this talk I will present a general framework for mobile travel surveys, review the associated challenges and research questions associated to each phase, and present some of the advances we have made in the context of the H2020 QROWD project. Speaker information: Luis-Daniel Ibáñez is a research fellow in the Web and Internet Science group of the University of Southampton, UK His research activity comprises the domains of the Web, Linked Open Data and Crowdsourcing. He holds a Ph.D in Informatics from the University of Nantes. He is currently the technical director of the H2020 QROWD project, and also participates in two further EU funded initiatives: the European Data Portal, where he contributes to the analysis of its effectivity, and the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum. Previously, he was deputy coordinator of the Open Data Incubator for Europe, an EU funded incubation program for SMEs innovating around Open Data