Who we are

‘‘ Cities are being continuously developed in a transition process. The built environment where people live, work and transport involves physical and cyber spaces, physical and digital infrastructures, natural environment, facilities and diverse services. The decision-making underlying people’s various daily and non-daily activities (e.g., shopping, social, leisure, tourism) and the short-term and long-term decisions (e.g., transportation mode, route choices, car ownership, housing) are vital for sustainable urban development. To meet the goal of carbon neutral society and to build up livable, accessible and connected urban environment, it is essential to maintain and improve people’s quality of life through smart decision makings.

This makes the understanding and prediction of individual people’s decision making fundamental because, only based on that, policy makers (planners, managers and governors) with different concerns can can make smart decisions. Because cities are increasingly equipped with new technologies, e.g., generating big data, creating deeper interactions between people and the environment, and city areas become tremendously hybrid featured in different urban settings, economic development, microclimate and culture, the power of artificial intelligence needs to be fully embedded. This triggers the need of methodological development in multidisciplinary research and elaboration of new approaches in practices in multiple scopes involving theory proving, choice modeling, artificial intelligence and data mining, statistical techniques, optimization, efficient computing etc.

Urban & Data Science is a research lab in Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University. We emphasize the research of smart decision making in urban environment. The purpose is to develop approaches, models and algorithms and apply them to different domains, involving both the microscope decision making of people (i.e., citizens, planners, companies) and the system level management and optimization with one or multiple goals. In this regard, we intend to conduct quality research on a variety of topics in urban studies and develop theory-driven and data-driven approaches.

For detailed research topics, please check our research output and overview pages. We welcome collaborations in any kinds. If you have any proposals or initiatives, please do not hesitate to contact us.’’