From Biases to Opportunities: Leveraging Location-Based-Service (LBS) Data for Transportation Planning
CME Department Seminar
October 9, 2025
10:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Presenter: Cynthia Chen, PhD, University of Washington
Location: ERF 1047 or Zoom.
Meeting ID: 535 718 1241
Passcode: Lin@842cme
Abstract: Location-Based-Service (LBS) data sourced from numerous mobile devices that now accompany people everywhere has the potential to revolutionize the practice of transportation planning in data collection, model development and policy designs. Its potential is however hampered by the lack of transparency on the part of researchers, transportation professionals, and LBS data vendors. At the same time, transportation agencies now face an increasing demand from LBS data vendors globally. This presentation will provide an overview of the biases in the LBS data. Specifically, I will present data quality issues and their effects on the resulting mobility metrics that are commonly used in the planning process. I will also discuss how LBS data can aid Household Travel Survey (HTS) data and transform the field of transportation planning. Specifically, I lay out four methodological advances (e.g., HTS and LBS fusion in privacy-aware mobility digital twins) that shall be pursued to realize the full promise of LBS data. Last and equally important, I will discuss ways that the community can collaborate to establish benchmark datasets and standards for trip inference and reporting while adhering to privacy constraints.
Speaker Bio: Cynthia Chen is a professor in the Departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. An internationally recognized leader in transportation science, she directs the THINK (Transportation–Human Interaction and Network Knowledge) Lab at UW. Her research tackles some of the most pressing challenges in mobility and resilience: uncovering biases in big data, developing innovative methods to fuse large-scale and small-scale data sources, modeling mobility behaviors of individuals and cascading processes in networks, and designing interventions that promote healthier, more resilient communities through routine-aware personalized recommendations and place-based peer-to-peer sharing.
Chen’s scholarship is widely published in top journals across transportation systems engineering, travel behavior, land use planning, and interdisciplinary venues such as PNAS and Nature Cities. Her work has been supported by numerous federal, state, and local agencies. Currently, she serves as Associate Director of the USDOT-funded National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand (led by UT Austin) and as an Associate Editor for Transportation Science.
Through the THINK Lab, Chen continues to push the boundaries of how we understand human mobility, networks, and resilience in the face of social and environmental change. More about her work can be found at https://sites.uw.edu/thinklab.
Date posted
Oct 1, 2025
Date updated
Oct 7, 2025