Zhenlong Li gave an invited presentation titled “Measuring Human Mobility Dynamics and Place Connectivity Using Big Social Media Data” at Geospatial Science and Human Security Division Director Seminar Series of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on June 24, 2021.
Abstract: Understanding human mobility dynamics among places provides fundamental knowledge regarding their interactive gravity, benefiting a wide range of applications in need of knowledge in human spatial interactions. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic uniquely highlights the need for monitoring, measuring, and predicting human movement at various geographic scales from local to global. This talk first introduces our recent effort in quantifying global human movement using billions of geotagged tweets coupled with big data computing, and then presents a global multi-scale place connectivity index (PCI) derived from such movement. Two application examples are followed to exemplify the utility of PCI as a factor in 1) predicting the spatial spread of COVID-19 during the early stage, and 2) predicting hurricane evacuation destination choices.
