סמינר מחלקתי - העיר המחוברת

הרצאת אורח:

Dr. Wei Pan, MIT Media Lab.

Bio

Dr. Wei Pan holds a Ph.D. in Computational Social Science from the MIT Media Lab.

Dr. Pan’s work concerns human behavior, big data and finance. In particular, measuring, understanding and predicting economical and financial activities as the collective behaviors of individuals by using modern sensing and modeling techniques.

Pan holds a B.Eng. from Tsinghua University in Computer Science. Dr. Pan's undergraduate thesis is already published in top international AI journal, and he has authored more than 20 articles in leading research journals including Science and Nature.

Dr. Pan is the winner of DARPA's 40th Anniversary of Internet Grand Challenge. He is the winner of the best talk award from Intl. Conference on Network Sciences 2012. He is named by IBM Research as the "Emerging leaders in multimedia". His work has been widely covered by NYTimes, CNN, The Economist, The Atlantic, Technology Review, New Scientist, etc.

Dr. Pan previously worked at Fidelity Investments and Google Research. He is currently a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Thasos Group, a big-data financial analytics firm based in NYC.

בנושא:

The Connected City

תקציר ההרצאה:

The city has its magic in the modern world: It is widely observed that when you double the population of a city, the innovation level and the r&d output of the city will be more than doubled: a phenomenon known as superlinear growth in literatures.

Historically, cities had been productive for industrial manufacturing, and economists have well explained the mechanism. In the new innovation age, why cities are also driving knowledge related productivity? This talk presents a theoretical model, the first of its kind, that combines social network, information diffusion and geography to explain the city magic. The model provides not only a closed form solution explaining city's innovation growth pattern, but also predicts its limits.

Moreover, after the original paper was published by us, more and more new data came out and suggest the correctness of our model's prediction. We will also discuss some extensions of our model, and discuss applications from the transportation and city design perspective of the model.