Yesterday I gave a talk on data-driven models to the Hong Kong Poly U Department of Land Surveying and Geomatics, and today I give a similar talk at at 2-30pm in Geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When I got to the Poly U yesterday – and I have been there a few times before – as early as 2001 in fact – I was amazed at the incredible building that had gone up in the last couple of years. The design school is housed in one of Zaha Hadid’s remarkable buildings that flows like sculpture and this was all the more resonant to me because of her passing away so recently. The talks I am giving pale in insignificance besides this wonderful building, that in fact could not have been developed at all with out the sort off digital technologies and indeed the big data that these lectures are all about.
The talks are about what everyone is calling ‘big data’, that is data that is far too large to fit into an Excel spreadsheet and requires some special skills to manage and massage it. I don’t have these skills but my post docs do. The talks will focus on how big data is the corollary to the smart city and vice versa but then goes on to summarise our work with land use transport models for England and Wales for the Future Cities Catapult where the models are now quite big and the data is bigger than we have been accustomed to simulating all in one piece and then also our work with Oyster Card data on the London Tube where the records are pretty large – files of billion plus transactions. I will post the PDF here for the recent CUHK here . The Poly U PDF is here.
