Qi “Ryan” Wang
Len Albright
BARI Assistant Director of Research on Social Media and Northeastern Professor, Qi “Ryan” Wang, in collaboration with Professor Len Albright, have been awarded a FY18 TIER 1 Research grant from Northeastern University for their project, “Neighborhood Connectivity and Social Inequality: Urban Travel Imbalances Based on Google Traffic Data.”
The project aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between community isolation and urban infrastructure systems. The development of urban infrastructures, such as road networks or mass transit systems, is often thought to have universal benefits by reducing community isolation. However, in reality they may exacerbate existing differences by disproportionately benefiting already strong connected communities and therefore further disadvantaging struggling communities. Professors Wang and Albright plan to analyze the dynamic connectivity among urban neighborhoods by using real-time estimations of travel time collected from Google Maps API. The project will start in July 2017 and finish in September 2018.