Representing the Underrepresented: Making the Case for Digital and Inclusive Data for Travel Activity Studies

With the progression of travel survey data collection rapidly toward electronic modes, known challenges with the digital divide and unit non-response biases raise concerns about including input from traditionally hard to reach groups. Important questions remain about how well the travel behaviors of these target groups (namely, transport disadvantaged communities) are represented in emerging travel data sets, in spite of conventional practices of applying standard household weighting adjustments. This presentation will discuss ongoing research efforts to understand the potential for mixed (traditional and electronic) survey modes for improving representation of these target group for travel activity studies

Speaker: Tierra Bills 

Dr. Tierra Bills is an Assistant Professor and Michigan Society Fellow in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. She has recently joined the University of Michigan (in Fall 2016) after spending 3 years as a Research Scientist at IBM Research Africa.

At IBM Research, Dr. Bills’ work focused on leveraging emerging data sources for various travel modeling applications. Like many developing cities, the rapid urbanization in Nairobi, Kenya over the past decade has given rise to a number of transportation-related challenges.  These challenges are made more difficult to tackle by the lack of available transportation data. For this reason, her work in applied machine learning supported the development of an automated and scalable smartphone-based system for measuring road quality conditions at a high resolution (e.g. estimating the number of potholes on a road segment).

Dr. Bills research interests generally include transportation equity analysis,  discrete choice analysis and behavioral modeling, transportation planning, and emerging data sources in transportation modeling. Dr. Bills holds a B.S in Civil Engineering Technology from Florida A&M University (‘08), and M.S (’09) and PhD (’13) degrees in Transportation Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.