INFUZE: Visualization for evaluating probabilistic and agent-based models of mobility transitions

Summary

One full scholarship is available at the School of Geography in 2025/26. This scholarship is open to UK and international applicants and covers tuition fees plus maintenance stipend at the UKRI rate (£19,237 in 2024/25) for three and a half years, subject to satisfactory progress.

This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in a range of fields relating to environmental science and climate change.

The School of Geography invites applications from prospective postgraduate researchers who wish to commence study for a PhD in the academic year 2025/26 for the School of Geography INFUZE scholarship.

The award is open to full-time candidates (UK and international) who have been offered a place on a PhD degree at the School of Geography.

In mobility analysis, visualization is often used informally to explore data under different social and environmental contexts, and from here generate new behavioural understanding. Separately, probabilistic and agent-based models provide a mechanism for simulating behaviours and asking what-if questions, resulting in a very large set of ensemble model outputs. But despite the apparent compatibility of visual and model-based approaches, the extent to which visual analytic designs are coupled with probabilistic and agent-based models is relatively limited. This PhD project will develop and apply approaches from geovisualization, risk communication and visual storytelling to interrogate, evaluate and communicate models developed as part of the Inspiring Futures for Zero Carbon Mobility (INFUZE) project.

INFUZE will generate models that simulate transitions away from individualised car ownership, informed by insights from community co-design activities, large-scale public attitude surveys and observed physical environment data. The outputs from these simulations will be analysed recursively and in detail. We are interested in the circumstances under which individuals are most affected by mobility transitions, behavioural response to transitions -- how attitudes and behaviours shift in response to shifting circumstances -- and the role of social norms informing behavioural response. The PhD project will develop tools to support this model-building process: helping model builders navigate a wide set of data analytic decisions, provide detailed outputs that support analysts to update prior knowledge in light of evidence and to compare, evaluate and communicate competing models under different probabilities.

Applicant skills/interests:

• Geovisualization
• Probabilistic and agent-based modelling
• Statistical methods for uncertainty representation, including Bayesian approaches
• Visual storytelling
• Visualization / statistical graphics programming (e.g. Python, R, D3, vega/vega-lite)
• Transport mobility analysis

References

Gelman, A., Hullman, J., & Kennedy, L. (2023). Causal Quartets: Different Ways to Attain the Same Average Treatment Effect. The American Statistician, 78(3), 267–272. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2023.2267597

Hullman, J., & Gelman, A. (2021). Designing for Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis Requires Theories of Graphical Inference. Harvard Data Science Review, 3(3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.3ab8a587

Hullman, J. (2020). Why Authors Don’t Visualize Uncertainty. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934287

Applicants should normally have at least an upper second class British Bachelors Honours degree (or equivalent) in geography or a related subject. A lower undergraduate degree can be supplemented by a relevant Masters degree. Applicants who are uncertain about the requirements for a particular research degree are advised to contact the Postgraduate Research Admissions team prior to making an application.

The minimum English language entry requirement for research postgraduate research study is an IELTS of 6.0 overall with at least 5.5 in each component (reading, writing, listening and speaking) or equivalent. The test must be dated within two years of the start date of the course in order to be valid. Some schools and faculties have a higher requirement.