Speaker Bio & Abstract
Hunter College of City University of New York
USA
BiographyDr. Hongmian Gong is a Professor of Geography at Hunter College and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dr. Gong has done substantial research on using GPS, smartphone, Web GIS, cloud computing, and social media for urban transportation and sustainability studies. She also organized or co-organized four symposiums in New York City on geospatial technologies for Transportation.AbstractA CyberGIS is developed to send data from iPhone and Android Apps to Amazon cloud computing for travel mode detection and transportation planning and provide feedbacks to users to encourage sustainable and healthy travel mode choices. We developed a CyberGIS in New York City, by which individuals can download a smartphone app from our website to send their location and accelerometer data to a cloud server where GIS algorithms and a multimodal transportation network are used to detect individuals' travel modes such as by walk, bike, subway, bus, commuter rail, car, and ferry. While the results of the travel mode detection are saved for transportation planning and modeling in New York City, they can also be used to estimate carbon emission/carbon avoidance and calorie/fat-burned of users' daily commute. At the press of a button on the smartphone app, these estimates are displayed on the smartphone app to help users to make sustainable and healthy travel mode choices, such as switching from drive alone to walking, biking, public transport (such as subway, bus, and commuter rail) or carpool. The effect of using smartphone apps to affect users' choices of travel modes is also evaluated through a small survey in New York City.