Behrang Assemi

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Manager at Deloitte

Smartphone travel surveys are becoming of central importance in collecting detailed, accurate data of people’s travel activities. As with their conventional survey counterparts, the quality of data collected through these surveys is adversely affected by participants’ non-response and resulting biases. However, little is known about the factors aff...

Heavy vehicle crashes are a major contributor to road-related fatalities. Representing only 3% of the total number of registered vehicles and 8% of the total vehicle kilometers traveled, heavy vehicles are involved in 18% of fatal and serious injury crashes in Australia. Given the contributing role of vehicle defects in many heavy vehicle crashes,...

Public transport origin–destination (OD) estimation based on smartcard data has increasingly been used for transit network planning, passengers’ behaviour analyses and network demand forecasting. While various OD estimation methods using the trip-chaining approach have been developed in recent years, the validity of these estimation methods has not...

This study provides empirical evidence and analyses of cruising time for parking in a dense urban area. A survey was conducted across three distinct geographical areas in the central business district (CBD) of Brisbane, Australia, over one week to assess the effect of parking and driving habits on search time for parking. Drivers’ parking behavior...

A record of spatial and temporal parking occupancy is critical to optimize on-street parking resources and to develop effective parking policies. Such data are often obtained through advanced and costly occupancy monitoring technologies. Moreover, it is usually challenging to integrate bay-level occupancies and parking data from other systems. Accu...

Background: Over the past decade, crowdsourcing marketplaces-online exchange platforms which facilitate commercial outsourcing of services-have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of participants (service providers and customers) and the value of outsourced services. Deciding about the most appropriate provider is a key challenge for customer...

The widespread and increased use of smartphones, equipped with the global positioning system (GPS), has facilitated the automation of travel data collection. Most studies on travel mode detection that used GPS data have employed hand-crafted features that may not have the capabilities to detect all complex travel behaviours since their performance...

Heavy vehicle crashes incur significant economic and social costs. Although most crashes are considered to be related to driver error, the effects of vehicle defects are major in many crashes. Therefore, various vehicle inspections including Queensland’s Certificate of Inspection (COI) scheme have been implemented to improve the safety of heavy veh...

Performance-based standards are an innovative method to manage parking and a conceptual means to review and change how we envision parking in the city. The challenge becomes to reshape how we think of parking space, one of the largest urban land uses, and apply methods of adapting other mobility uses to parking slots. A performance-based approach i...

Pre-trip information about parking significantly impacts users’ decision-making and results in more efficient use of parking and the traffic network. Parking Information Systems (PIS) are increasingly being used to provide drivers with real-time information about parking availability and navigate them to a vacant space – in its simplest form – to a...

Payment behaviour for on-street parking was analysed to understand patterns and improve management and operations of the facilities. Data from three parking locations in the central business district (CBD) of Brisbane, Australia, including spatiotemporal attributes, parking utiliztion and fines, and customers’ behaviour over one week were used in t...

Heavy vehicle crashes incur significant economic and social costs. Although most crashes are considered to be related to driver error, the effects of vehicle defects are major in many crashes. Therefore, various vehicle inspections including Queensland’s Certificate of Inspection (COI) scheme have been implemented to improve the safety of heavy veh...

Background: The existing smartphones' technology allows for the objective measurement of a person's movements at a fine-grained level of geographic and temporal detail, and in doing so, it mitigates the issues associated with self-report biases and lack of spatial details. This study proposes and evaluates the advantages of using a smartphone app...

Despite great business outcomes that some service providers achieve on crowdsourcing marketplaces, many are unable to find customers, transact on a regular basis and survive. Previous research on the customer–provider relationship development in these marketplaces has shown the impact of provider profiles on customers’ decision-making and highlight...

Despite great business outcomes that some service providers achieve on crowdsourcing marketplaces, many are unable to find customers, transact on a regular basis and survive. Previous research on the customer–provider relationship development in these marketplaces has shown the impact of provider profiles on customers’ decision-making and highlight...

Over the past decade, crowdsourcing marketplaces — online exchange platforms which facilitate commercial outsourcing of services — have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of participants (service providers and customers) and the value of outsourced services. On crowdsourcing marketplaces, provider profiles and especially previous customers’...

Heavy vehicle crashes cause significant economic and social costs. Although most crashes are considered to be related to driver errors, the impact of vehicle defects is evident in many crashes (Blower et al., 2010). Hence, different vehicle inspection schemes, including Queensland’s certificate of inspection (COI), have been implemented around the...

Estimating longitudinal vehicle speed is required in a wide range of applications from road safety to vehicular emissions modelling. Each vehicle speed estimation method has specific challenges including the high cost of measurement equipment, the small range of vehicle models accessible for performing tests and the low resolution of data in time a...

This paper presents a new smartphone application, Wander, to capture high resolution space-time information on urban dwellers. We detail both the mechanism as well as the analytic platform through which broad scale spatial mobility studies can be mounted to reveal how individuals move through spaces and interact with the social and physical element...

Despite the great business outcomes some service providers achieve on crowdsourcing marketplaces, many are unable to find customers, transact on a regular basis and survive. Previous research on the customer–provider relationship development in these marketplaces has shown the impact of provider profiles on customers’ decision-making and highlighte...

Introduction It is now well established that the built environment can facilitate or hinder physical activity (PA), including walking and cycling for transport purposes. However, the greatest majority of the evidence relies on self-reported measures of PA. Questionnaires have a low level of accuracy compared to devices such as accelerometers and pe...

Smartphone travel surveys are becoming of central importance in complementing traditional survey methods, especially for collecting detailed, accurate travel data of special groups, such as young adults. Previous studies have shown the application of smartphone travel surveys in various contexts and discussed their advantages. As occurs with their...

The increasing demand for advanced modelling methods, which can reflect complex travel activities of individuals, requires enhanced travel data collection methods. The introduction of GPS-assisted data collection methods has provided an alternative to the conventional methods of travel data collection. GPS-assisted data collection methods improve t...

Smart card data are increasingly used for transit network planning, passengers’ behaviour analysis and network demand forecasting. Public transport origin–destination (O–D) estimation is a significant product of processing smart card data. In recent years, various O–D estimation methods using the trip-chaining approach have attracted much attention...

Smartphone travel surveys are able to capture accurate details about individuals' travel behavior. However, extracting the required information (e.g., travel mode and purpose) from the data captured by smartphone applications is relatively complex, particularly when relying on the computational power of smartphones and limiting the communications b...

Crowdsourcing marketplaces are increasingly becoming popular for the online transactions of services. On these marketplaces, profile information of providers, especially feedback left by previous customers, is the main information source for choice decisions of prospective customers. In the study reported in this paper, we examined the impacts of v...

This paper puts forward a method to automatically detect trips/trip-segments based on the instantaneous movement attributes of individuals that can be collected automatically by smartphone sensors. The goal is to enhance the accuracy of collected data by better identifying single mode trips/trip-segments, while minimizing participant’s involvement...

Smartphone-assisted travel surveys are becoming of central importance in collecting detailed, accurate data of people’s travel activities. As occurs with their conventional survey counterparts, the quality of the data collected through these surveys is adversely affected by participants’ non-response and the resulting biases. However, little is kno...

This paper puts forward a method that automatically detects trips and trip segments with data on the instantaneous movement attributes of individuals that can be collected automatically by smartphone sensors. The goal is to enhance the accuracy of the data collected through the better identification of single-mode trips and trip segments while mini...

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) is a prominent source of revenue for search engine companies, and also a solution for businesses to promote their visibility on the Web. However, there is little academic research available about the factors and the extent to which they may influence businesses’ decision to adopt SEA. Building on Theory of Planned Be...

Crowdsourcing has been used widely for the collection of stated preference data (e.g., responses in a survey) by researchers. However, the use of crowdsourcing for collection of revealed preference data (e.g., real-life data collected in natural experiments) is much less common. The study reported in this short (research-in-progress) paper shows ho...

This study introduces a new smartphone-based system for performing personal travel data collection. The system, SITSS (Smartphone-based Individual Travel Survey System), is designed to deal with the challenges associated with applying smartphones in real-world travel surveys, including battery depletion, participant’s involvement and privacy concer...

This paper introduces a smartphone-based system for performing personal travel data collection. The Smartphone-Based Individual Travel Survey System (SITSS), is designed to deal with the challenges associated with applying smartphones in real-world travel surveys, including battery depletion, participant involvement, and privacy concerns. A prompte...

The increasing demand for advanced modelling methods, which can reflect complex travel activities of individuals, requires enhanced travel data collection methods. The introduction of GPS-assisted data collection methods has provided an alternative to conventional methods. It improves the accuracy of data collection and captures more details of ind...

Electronic service marketplaces (ESMs) have become major exchange platforms for the online outsourcing of different services – especially software development – to providers. Provider profiles on ESMs encompass extensive information regarding the activities and transactions of providers and they are a main source of information for customers. Such...