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Vonu Thakuriah is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics (RUCI) Lab at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research interests include transportation planning and operations; big data, urban informatics, smart cities, and social and economic cyberinfrastructure; and the data justice implications of information technology, artificial intelligence, and automation. She has extensive experience assisting government agencies and private companies in identifying data-intensive and technology-based solutions to complex urban and mobility challenges, with a focus on ethical and environmentally sustainable outcomes.

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Research Background

Vonu is the author of two books (Transportation and Information: Trends in Technology and Policy and Seeing Cities with Big Data: Research, Methods, and Applications in Urban Informatics (edited)), as well as around 200 journal papers and reports on her research topics. Her work has appeared in journals such as Future Generation Computer Systems; PlosOne; Journal of Transport Geography; Transportation Research Part C; Journal of Transportation Engineering; Transportation Research Part A; Computers, Environment and Urban Systems; Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning; Environment and Planning B; Accident Analysis and Prevention; ACM Proc SIGSPATIAL GIS; ACM Proc SIGIR; Journal of Applied Statistics; among other scientific journals. She has given keynote addresses and plenary talks at prestigious international and national venues including the National Academy of Sciences, the European Commission in Brussels and Luxembourg, the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the Leibnitz Center for Informatics in Germany, and the National Institute of Informatics in Japan.

Vonu’s research has been supported by National Science Foundation, the European Commission, UK Research and Innovation, US Department of Transportation, Community Transportation Association of America, and other federal and state and local agencies (out of $70 million in total grant funds, she was Principal Investigator of $25 million). She has worked on transportation and data initiatives with governments in Malaysia, China, India, Australia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and various European countries, in addition to the Scottish and UK governments, and a number of state and local agencies within the US. She was a long-time member of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s Transportation Committee and the Advanced Technology Task Force, and she has worked on city-level transportation and data projects with the City of Chicago, and the Glasgow UK City Council, among other urban areas.

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Service and Prior Appointments

Vonu is a member of the data science committee of the National Academy of Sciences, the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. She serves on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, the Harvard Data Science Review, and the Journal of Big Data Analytics in Transportation. She had previously served as a member of the UK Office of National Statistics Data Science Advisory Board, and as a member of the European Commission/Eurostat’s New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics. She recently headed the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s International Expert Committee on Smart Cities.

Vonu served as the Dean of the Bloustein School in Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is currently an Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, UK, and was previously the Ch2M Endowed Chair Professor of Transport at that institution. She was the founding director and Principal Investigator of the multi-institution Urban Big Data Centre funded by the UK Research and Innovation’s Economic and Social Research Council that was responsible for providing a UK-wide urban big data infrastructure for social and economic research and smart cities applications. She was a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Commission, and her postdoctoral position was funded by the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, which recently presented her with their distinguished alumni award.

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Click here to pronounce Vonu’s name: Name-Coach 

Click here for CV: Download CV

Click here for the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab (RUCI Lab): https://rucilab.rutgers.edu/

Click here for ORCHID profile: ORCHID page

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Latest (2023) papers:

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
Thakuriah, P., C. Boididou, and J. Hong
Environment and Planning B: Urban analytics and city science (early online 2023)
https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083231215822

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

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

Functional distributional clustering using spatio-temporal data
Venkatasubramanian, A., L. Evers, P. Thakuriah and K. Ampountolas
Journal of Applied Statistics (2023)
https://doi.org/10.1080/02664763.2021.2001443