Movement Research in the Age of AI New Publication Co-Authored by Former Fellows
- Details
-
Dodge, S., Weibel, R., et al. Movement Research in the Era of Big Data, AI, and Open Science. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–20 (2026).
When Somayeh Dodge and Robert Weibel convened a workshop during their Collegium fellowship, they brought together researchers and technology developers around a shared challenge. Now, the participants have turned their discussions into a joint publication.
For their workshop "Movement Analytics in the Era of Big Data and Open Science," Somayeh and Robert brought together researchers and technology developers from academia and industry to discuss the state of open science in computational movement analysis. The workshop addressed how movement data, despite its growing importance across fields from public health to wildlife conservation, remains largely proprietary, with significant barriers around locational privacy, reproducibility, and the transferability of analytical methods across disciplines and geographic scales.
The resulting article, Movement Research in the Era of Big Data, AI, and Open Science, examines how rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the increasing availability of movement data are opening new possibilities for fields such as urban planning, transportation, pandemic management, and disaster response. The authors argue for a stronger geographic perspective in future AI-driven mobility research, and outline strategies for governing large-scale mobility data in ways that foster transparency, reproducibility, and open science.