Understanding Migrants' Usage Patterns of Cyber-Physical Infrastructure

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.

1. What insights can be gathered from a dataset that reflects the existing usage patterns, needs, and opportunities regarding migrants use of urban cyber-infrastructure?
2. What descriptive and diagnostic analytics could be developed to better understand accessibility, opportunity, and capacity building for migrants in the context of urban infrastrucutre?
3. 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?

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

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

Publications

Mollajafari, M., & Patterson, Z. (2027). Emerging methods in the collection, processing and analysis of data in transportation planning. In C. Wang & G. Gopakumar (Eds.), Next-Generation Cities: An Encyclopedia (Vol. 3: Mobile, Secure and Sharing Cities, pp. 300). World Scientific Series on Emerging Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1142/13660-vol3 (external link) 

Waqfi, L., Mollajafari, M., Farooq, B., & Patterson, Z. (2025). The residential location choice of immigrants: a systematic review and future directions. Transport Reviews, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2025.2579659 (external link) 

Past events and presentations:

• "Toward Realism and Diversity: Addressing Sampling and Structural Zeros in Synthetic Population Generation", presented by Abbasi, F., TRB 2026 Conference, Washington, USA, 11 January, 2026
• "Llmsurv: A large language model-based framework for competing-risk survival modeling of daily travel-activity behavior", presented by Mollajafari, M,, TRB 2026 Conference, Washington, USA, 11 January, 2026
• "A Two-Stage Deep Neural Network Framework for Choice Set Generation and Destination Choice Modeling Using Cross-Attention and ResLogit", presented by Haghi, H., TRB 2026 Conference, Washington, USA, 11 January, 2026
• "Lstm vs. distilbert: A comparative study for 2025 shl recognition challenge" presented by Mollajafari, M., at the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, Espoo, Finland, 12 October, 2025
• "Transportation Models for Understanding Immigrant Behavior via Population Synthesis", presented by Abbasi, F. at the First Bridging Divides Research Discovery Retreat, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, 9 October, 2025
• Multiple presentations at the “The 4th Workshop on Urban Systems Research: Event chair,” hosted by B. Farooq & Z. Hollander at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada, October 6, 2025.
• "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
• "Enhancing Population Synthesis With Generative Multi-Source Imputation", presented by Mollajafari, M. at TRB 2025 Conference, Washington, United States, January 5, 2025

• "Daily activity pattern prediction using bidirectional encoder representations from transformers", presented by Abbasi, F. at TRB 2025 Conference, Washington, United States, January 5, 2025
• “Choice set generation in work destination choice modeling with variational autoencoders”, presented by Houman Haghi at TRB 2025 Conference, Washington, United States, January 5, 2025
• The 3rd Workshop on Urban Systems Research, presented at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, October 4, 2024.

Canadian migrant; cyber-physical infrastructure; migrant support; statistical analysis; usage patterns