Understanding Migrants' Usage Patterns of Cyber-Physical Infrastructure

Project Lead

Team Members:

Farbod Abbasi, Henrique De Freitas Serra, Houman Haghi, Mahan Mollajafari

Sub-Theme: Cyber-Physical Service Infrastructure

This sub-theme explores how cyber-physical infrastructure influences migrant accessibility, opportunity, and integration outcomes. It examines the interplay between physical and social infrastructures, their impact on migrant support, and the role of infrastructure in shaping migration patterns.

Objective

Building on the datasets collected in the related study, 'Observing migrants' usage patterns of cyber-physical infrastructure', this project will then develop detailed descriptive and diagnostic analytics to provide key insights on accessibility, opportunity, and capacity building for migrants in the context of urban infrastructure.

Research Questions

What insights can be gathered from a dataset that reflects the existing usage patterns, needs, and opportunities regarding migrants use of urban cyber-infrastructure?
What descriptive and diagnostic analytics could be developed to better understand accessibility, opportunity, and capacity building for migrants in the context of urban infrastrucutre?
How could a web interface-based dashboard provide municipal, provincial, and federal stakeholders with key insights on current patterns of migrants using cyber-physical infrastructure?

Methodology

This project will use a mix of descriptive and diagnostic methods including statistical analysis techniques and geographic information systems based spatial analysis.

Status

The project is active and multiple knowledge mobilization efforts are currently ongoing. The team is working on a survey to supplement data and is developing digital data tools to support the analysis.

Expected completion date: Winter 2026

Outcomes

Past events and presentations:

“Reframing choice set formation: An attention-enhanced ResLogit model for destination choice”, to be presented by Houman Haghi at ISTDM 2025 Conference, Montreal, Canada, September 3–5, 2025
“Exploring the potential of large language models in daily travel activity pattern prediction”, co-authored with Zachary Patterson and Bilal Farooq, presented at hEART 2025, Munich, Germany, June 11, 2025
“Choice set generation in work destination choice modeling with variational autoencoders”, presented by Houman Haghi at TRB 2025 Conference, Washington, United States, January 2025