Takahiro Yabe
My research develops tools and models for analyzing large-scale human behavior data to better understand collective social dynamics during disruptions, and to improve the resilience of communities and cities to urban shocks (e.g., disasters, pandemics, and disruptive technology). My recent works have focused on modeling the resilience of complex urban sociotechnical systems to natural hazards [PNAS, Sustainable Cities and Society], human behavior analysis during and after disasters and pandemics [CEUS, Sci. Rep.], quantifying the long-term dynamics of diversity in urban encounters in cities [arXiv], and geospatial AI methods for transferring urban dynamics across cities [ACM KDD, Nature Machine Intelligence]. My research lies in the intersections of civil engineering, computational social science, network science, and urban informatics.
I am a Postdoc at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and Media Lab mentored by Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and Esteban Moro. I received my Ph.D. from Purdue University, advised by Satish V. Ukkusuri (Civil Engineering) and Seungyoon Lee (Communication). Prior to that, I obtained my Masters and Bachelor Degrees from the University of Tokyo, advised by Yoshihide Sekimoto (Urban Informatics). I am also passionate in transforming my research to help policy making. I was a Data Science Consultant for the World Bank, working on human mobility data analytics for urban disaster risk management and transportation resilience modeling.