2024 John Taplin Memorial Lecture by Antonio Páez

The 2024 John Taplin Memorial Lecture

Hägerstrand Meets Big Data: Time-Geography in the Age of Mobility Analytics

Presenter: Antonio Páez, Professor in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Time-geography, the brainchild of Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand, has for decades been a key element to understanding, describing, and explaining space-time behavior. Hägerstrand, parting from first principles, was able to deduce essential rules that describe the potential and constraints of space-time behavior. This he achieved with a prodigious leap of the imagination, decades before technologies such as GPS in phones, fitness trackers, and so on reached mainstream consumers. Today, massive amounts of data are generated that describe movement at a level of resolution that was perhaps unimaginable even two or three decades ago. Mobility analytics has progressed in leaps and bounds, meeting Hägerstrand's ideas from the past with technologies of the future. In this talk, Professor Paez will review the trajectory of time-geography and what modern mobility analytics mean to Hägerstrand's fundamental conceptual framework, and what in turn, the framework can tell us about the future of mobility analytics.

Antonio Páez is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University. He trained as a civil engineer and upon joining McMaster was adopted into geography as his home discipline. Now he specializes in spatial data analysis, discrete choice modeling, transportation systems, accessibility, and urban and health geography. He is listed as author or co-author in 150 peer reviewed articles in international academic journals, and also recently released his co-authored book Discrete Choice Analysis in R published by Springer. Since 2008 he has been co-Editor- in-Chief of Journal of Geographical Systems. Besides transportation, geography, and space, he has long-standing interests in science, languages, science fiction, fantasy, and art. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where the summers are short but hot.