Dr Varun Ojha, Department of Computer Science, University of Reading

Do the dynamics of the city environment influence us and how?

Abstract

As a part of my research with a team at the ETH Zurich, we investigated a detailed answer to the question "Do the dynamics of the city environment influence us and how"? We adopted Machine Learning and Data Mining approaches for investigating such relationship between the dynamics of the city environment and the human perception. A complex and messy dataset was analyzed and resolved for this purpose. The machine learning analysis and its results will focus on answering the following questions: (i) What are the factors that need to be accounted for from the city environment? (ii) How can we collect and process messy and complex datasets? (ii) Can we predict the citizen's perception based on a particular environmental condition? (iv) Are we able to infer a detailed relationship between a citizen's perception and the city environment? (v) What are the significant factors that influence a citizen's perception? (vi) Does the citizen exhibit positive or negative emotion towards a certain environment?

Varun Ojha is Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Reading. He worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich. He obtained his PhD as a Marie-Curie Research Fellow in Computer Science, Communication Technology, and Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Ostrava, The Czech Republic. He worked in interdisciplinary research projects on machine learning and computation intelligence. He worked in an interdisciplinary research project under the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India at the Visavariti University and Indian Institute of Science Engineering and Technology, Shibpur. Dr Ojha's research interests are in Neural Networks, Fuzzy Inference Systems, Evolutionary Computation and Data Engineering. He has been involved in several multidisciplinary research project. He has several research publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. He is currently a member of professional bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Organised by BCS SGAI The Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence http://www.bcs-sgai.org