Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy building

About Us

The Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics (RUCI) Lab is devoted to research and engagement in data science for the common good.

Our mission is to support socially-just, environmentally resilient, and healthy cities and regions, through technology, analytics and outreach.

We build actionable algorithms and data applications by merging deep domain knowledge and data science expertise to help citizens, communities, and public, private and non-profit organizations.

We advocate for FAIR and responsible innovation in research and applications using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), statistical methods, Big Data, and GIScience. We specialize in new areas of data science such as Urban Informatics, Public Policy Analytics, Smart Cities, Urban Mobility, Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development, and Healthcare Analytics.

We provide a forum for researchers with similar interests to come together to advance interdisciplinary research, critical thinking, and new insights in our priority areas. We provide support for data services in our priority areas and facilitate outreach and interactions with the community to improve their wellbeing through robust data and civic technology.

People

Piyushimita “Vonu” Thakuriah

Director

Faculty Profile

Piyushimita “Vonu” Thakuriah is a Distinguished Professor in Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Director of the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab. Her primary research interests are in the data science and policy aspects of transportation, urban informatics, smart cities, and social and economic cyberinfrastructure. Her interdisciplinary methodological work and engagement with government agencies and private industry aim to reduce social and economic disparities while also increasing sustainability, data justice, and data science for the public good.

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, UK Research and Innovation, European Commission, US Department of Transportation, and number of other national, state, and local organizations internationally. She has given keynotes and plenaries in leading data science and transportation venues globally. She is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and previously served as a member of the Advisory Board of the UK Office of National Statistics Data Science Campus, as well as the European Commission/Eurostat’s New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics Committee. She recently chaired the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s International Expert Committee on smart cities.

She was previously the Dean of the Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, after serving as the Ch2M Endowed Chair Professor of Transport in the University of Glasgow, UK, and as the founding director of the Urban Big Data Centre, a multi-institutional UK-wide data infrastructure for cities research and innovation funded by the UK Research and Innovation.

Vonu graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a PhD in Public Policy Analysis and a master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy. She was a European Commission Marie Curie Fellow and her postdoctoral fellowship was supported by NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.

Selected Publications

Thakuriah, P., C. Boididou and J. Hong. Physical distancing and its association with travel behavior in daily pre-pandemic urban life: An analysis utilizing lifelogging images and composite survey and mobility data. Forthcoming in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.

Chen, L., J. Wang, and P. Thakuriah (2023). Quality-Guaranteed and Cost-Effective Population Health Profiling: A Deep Active Learning Approach. ACM Transactions for Computing in Healthcare (August 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3617179

Thakuriah, Piyushimita (Vonu) (2023). Exploring Car-Ownership and Declining Carlessness in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Findings, March. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.72773.

Venkatasubramanian, A., L. Evers, P. Thakuriah and K. Ampountolas (2021). Functional distributional clustering using spatio-temporal data. Journal of Applied Statistics. https://doi.org/10.1080/02664763.2021.2001443

Chen, L., Thakuriah, P.V. & Ampountolas, K. Short-Term Prediction of Demand for Ride-Hailing Services: A Deep Learning Approach. J. Big Data Anal. Transp. (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42421-021-00041-4

Wu, G., J. Hong, and P. Thakuriah (2021). Investigating temporal changes in the relationship between time spent on the Internet and Non-mandatory activity-travel time use. Transportation, pp. 1-23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-021-10174-8

Sun, Y. and P. Thakuriah P (2021). Public transport availability inequalities and transport poverty risk across England. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. February. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808321991536

Hong, J., P. Thakuriah, P. Mason, C. Lido (2020). The role of numeracy and financial literacy skills in the relationship between information and communication technology use and travel behavior. Travel Behaviour and Society, Vol. 21, pp. 257-264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tbs.2020.07.007

Thakuriah, P., K. Sila-Nowicka, J. Hong, C. Boididou, M. Osborne, C. Lido, A. McHugh (2020). Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD): A Composite Survey and Sensing Approach to Understanding Urban Living and Mobility. In Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. Early online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2019.101427

Wu, W., W. Liu, P. Thakuriah and J. Wang (2020). The Geography of Human Activity and Land Use: A Big Data Approach. In Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning. Vol. 97, 102523 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102523

Chen L., Sun Y., Thakuriah P. (2020) Modelling and Predicting Individual Salaries in United Kingdom with Graph Convolutional Network. In: Madureira A., Abraham A., Gandhi N., Varela M. (eds) Hybrid Intelligent Systems. HIS 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 923, pp. 61-74, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14347-3_7

Thakuriah, P. (2020). COVID-19 and Movement Patterns in New Jersey. Technical Report on Phase 1 of COVID-19 Lockdown. https://rucilab.rutgers.edu/covid-19-and-movement-patterns-in-new-jersey/

Wu, G., J. Hong and P. Thakuriah (2019). Assessing the Relationships Between Young Adults’ Travel and Use of the Internet over Time. Transportation Research – Part A, Vol 125, pp. 8-19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2019.05.002

Anejionu, O. C. D., P. Thakuriah, A. McHugh, Y. Sun, D. McArthur, P. Mason, and Rod Walpole (2019). Spatial urban data system: A cloud-enabled big data infrastructure for social and economic urban analytics. In Future Generation Computer Systems, Vol 98, pp. 456-473. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.03.052

Anejionu, O. C. D., Y. Sun, P. Thakuriah, A. McHugh, P. Mason (2019). Great Britain Transport, Housing, and Employment Access Datasets for small-area Urban Area Analytics. Journal Data in Brief, Vol. 27, Article 104616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2019.104616

Sila-Nowicka, K. and P. Thakuriah (2019). Multi-sensor movement analysis for transport safety and health applications. In PLoSONE 14(1):e0210090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0210090

Chen, L., K. Ampountolas and P. Thakuriah (2019). Predicting Uber Demand in NYC with Wavenet. Proc. Smart Accessibility 2019: The Fourth International Conference on Universal Accessibility in the Internet of Things and Smart Environments, pp. 1-5.

McHugh, A. and P. Thakuriah (2018). Developing smart statistics for urban mobility: Challenges and opportunities. https://dgins2018.statisticsevents.ro/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/23-Developing-smart-statistics-for-urban-mobility.pdf

Paule, J. D. G., Y. Sun and P. Thakuriah (2018). Beyond Geo-Tagged Tweets: Exploring the Geo-Localization of Tweets for Transportation Applications. In Transportation Analytics in the Era of Big Data, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75862-6_1

Hong, J. and P. Thakuriah (2018). Examining the relationship between different urbanization settings, smartphone use to access the Internet and trip frequencies.In Journal of Transport Geography, Vol 69, pp 11-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2018.04.006