My work lies at the intersection between cities and technologies. My goal is to build better cities through technology, innovation and citizen participation. I focus on empowering local communities with cutting-edge technology and enabling them to act on pressing environmental issues in their local environment.  I’m leveraging my European projects to bring climate action in education. In specific, I’m showing children in primary and secondary schools how they could have an active role in making our cities and communities more sustainable. I do so by co-designing, co-deploying and co-monitoring nature based solutions with the children in schools to explain them and show them with the data from sensors how these green solutions have multiple positive impacts on the local environment.

My area of expertise is smart cities and in specific geospatial analysis and modelling of urban dynamics, which involves the development of GIS based models and decision support tools, in order to pre-empt the impacts resulting from the interactions between human population and the environment. I use a range of pervasive and community sensing applications as a means of calibration and validation of these GIS tools. I then integrate the GIS models and data streams from pervasive sensing deployments with advanced machine learning algorithms to gain a better understanding of the spatial dynamics in cities.

I am currently exploring the use of these GIS based tools as a way to integrate co-design in urban planning and pervasive sensing (static and mobile as part of citizen science initiatives). This is achieved as part of Living Lab activities which focus on improving city life from environmental and resilience to extreme weather events perspectives. It will be explored further during the course of my work as part of my H2020 projects: iSCAPE (Coordinator and Principal Investigator) focusing on smart control of air pollution and OPERANDUM (Principal Investigator for UCD) focusing on reducing flood risk with nature-based solutions, both of which are piloted in Dublin. I’m also empowering local communities by providing them with the tools (low cost sensors for air quality and traffic counts) and skills to achieve a more sustainable and healthier local environment as part of the H2020 WeCount (Principal Investigator for UCD). Separate to this, I am also exploring the use of geospatial big data and sentiment rich social media data to inform the quantity and quality of nature based solutions in cities as part of another H2020 project called Connecting Nature (Principal Investigator for UCD). Finally, I’m developing Scalable, Privacy-Enhanced Analytics for sharing mobility systems as part of a SFI Investigator grant of which I’m the Principal Investigator for UCD. I’ve been active in GIS modelling and spatial data analysis for 15 years and I acquired considerable experience in networks of sensors for urban monitoring and data mining during my collaborations with IBM as part an IBM Faculty Award (2017) and two different research laboratories in MIT as part of a Fulbright/EPA TechImpact Award (2015) and his PhD (2011) research work.