PIPages
Labs

Guang Wang

Florida State University, FL·Computer Science

Data on how people move through cities can help researchers study traffic, plan neighborhoods, track disease spread and understand economies. Most of this mobility data, however, is owned by companies.

Fields

Computer Science

Engineering

Social Science

Topics

mobility data

human mobility

synthetic data

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Build cross-domain data curation tools for MobilityNet that combine real mobility datasets from different sources to reduce data bias.
  2. Develop socially informed methods to interpret real mobility data, drawing on user studies to recover meaning that movement records leave implicit.
  3. Generate realistic synthetic mobility data using generative machine learning with differential privacy, a mathematical privacy guarantee, and evaluate its utility, privacy and fairness with measurable metrics.
  4. Share the synthetic mobility data with 19 partners across transportation, urban planning, geography, epidemiology and economics.

More about the research

It is costly or impossible to obtain, and sharing it raises serious privacy concerns. This project asks whether realistic synthetic, or artificial, mobility data can stand in for the real thing. The goal is data that is useful to researchers, protects individual privacy, and treats different groups fairly.

Why it matters

Researchers who study traffic, city planning, disease spread and economics often cannot get detailed human movement data because it is private and proprietary. Privacy-protecting synthetic mobility data could give these fields realistic data to work with while lowering the risk of exposing individuals. The project also aims to reduce bias so that results reflect diverse populations fairly.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

Collaborative Research: Frameworks: MobilityNet: A Trustworthy CI Emulation Tool for Cross-Domain Mobility Data Generation and Sharing towards Multidisciplinary Innovations

NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027

Closest labs

Vishnu Boddeti

Michigan State University, MI·Computer Science

Derive theoretical limits on the trade-offs among predictive accuracy, robustness across patient populations and privacy in healthcare AI models, and evaluate them in practice.

Constantine Kontokosta

New York University, NY·Social Science

Identify representativeness bias in smartphone mobility data, meaning which groups are over- or undercounted, and develop methods to correct it.

Shuangqing Wei

Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering

Generate a synthetic video dataset of tracheostomy-dependent infants to train privacy mechanisms, identity separation and recombination systems, and classifiers when real patient video is scarce.

The school

Florida State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $461M a year on research, 481 research doctorates a year.

More about Florida State University

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