
Joao Porto De Albuquerque- Professor
- Professor (Full) at University of Glasgow
Joao Porto De Albuquerque
- Professor
- Professor (Full) at University of Glasgow
Professor in Urban Analytics, Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre, University of Glasgow.
About
239
Publications
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Introduction
Professor Porto de Albuquerque is leading a research programme on participatory urban analytics centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data to improve resilience to health and environmental risks.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
Education
March 2004 - March 2006
March 2002 - March 2004
March 2002 - May 2006
Publications
Publications (239)
In recent years, social media emerged as a potential resource to improve the management of crisis situations such as disasters triggered by natural hazards. Although there is a growing research body concerned with the analysis of the usage of social media during disasters, most previous work has concentrated on using social media as a standalone in...
This chapter investigates an intrinsic ambivalence in the use of digital technologies by citizen science projects: the often-used “citizen sensor” metaphor can either mean a heightened capacity to perceive and articulate an alternative world view (and thus results in empowerment); or it can connote that the citizen’s capabilities are constrained to...
This article investigates the role of digital technologies and data innovations, such as big data and citizen-generated data, to enable transformations to sustainability. We reviewed recent literature in this area and identified that the most prevailing assumption of work is related to the capacity of data to inform decision-making and support tran...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) has evolved as a popular dataset for global urban analyses, such as assessing progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. However, many analyses do not account for the uneven spatial coverage of existing data. We employ a machine-learning model to infer the completeness of OSM building stock data for 13,189 urban agglome...
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and have increasing impacts, which disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities. This article proposes and assesses a new methodological approach for developing innovative solutions based on urban data analytics to address sustainability challenges in light of changing climate...
Landslides, a global phenomenon, significantly impact economies and societies, especially in densely populated areas. Effective mitigation requires awareness of landslide risks, yet temporal links between occurrences are often neglected, challenging model performance due to non-stationary triggering and predisposing factors. This study presents a n...
Effectively reducing the risk of disasters in urban neighbourhoods is a key policy priority, which is becoming more pressing due to climate change. However, disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation efforts are often hampered by data gaps regarding the physical vulnerability and local impacts of hazards at the neighbourhood level. These gaps a...
Data-driven humanitarianism is changing the face of aid. More data potentially enables quicker and more efficient evidence-based responses to situations of conflict and disaster. Yet the proliferation of data also challenges traditional lines of accountability, exacerbates the drive toward extractive relations and processes while deepening communic...
Climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction policy frameworks emphasize the importance of engaging vulnerable communities in data creation and utilization to enhance resilience. Yet, empirical evidence on how capacity strengthening and community data generation can improve post-disaster recovery processes remains limited. To address this gap, th...
This article presents a case study on the experimental co-creation process of a digital platform supporting Sustainable Public Food Procurement (SPFP) in public kindergartens in a medium-sized city in Poland. The organisation of SPFP requires a dedicated technological infrastructure to ensure the information flow among food producers, kindergarten...
Globally, transport accounts for around one- fifth of CO2 emissions. However, , leveraging the DF data in modeling hyperlocal traffic CO2 and exploring the potential environmental justice is still underexplored. Here, we first extract traffic flows from the DF data, including individual GPS tracks, traffic counts, and car ownership rates in Glasgow...
In the past few years, the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus has emerged as a key concept to address the complex relationships and interdependencies between food, water, and energy systems. Cities are an important context for understanding the FWE nexus given their significant footprints and complex socio-ecological systems, but researchers have only r...
Cartographic resources play a crucial role in facilitating communication across various sectors, including research projects focused on low-income communities. Despite this, some researchers still adhere to colonialist and exploitative approaches. This study aims to promote equitable university–community interaction though cartographic resources, a...
This paper aims to showcase the community mapping process that took place in the El Pacífico neighborhood in the city of Medellín, Colombia, which runs alongside the urban-rural border of the high slope of the city’s Comuna 8. The geographical and socio-economic challenges that the community has historically faced have come to light throughout the...
Purpose
Disasters continue to be most prevalent and severe for marginalised communities. To reach those furthest behind first, as the global community pledges in the 2030 Agenda, a critical assessment of equity in disaster risk governance is necessary. Yet, the understanding of factors that mediate the capacity of the governance processes to achiev...
Critical studies of data visualization often highlight how the reductive nature of visualization methods excludes data limitations and qualities that are crucial to understanding those data. This case study explores how a data visualization could express contingent, situated, and contextual facets of data. We examine how such data limitations might...
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and have increasing impacts, which disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities. Adapting to the new climatic conditions and building resilience to disaster risks such as floods are some of today’s most significant challenges. This article presents and evaluates a novel method...
This briefing is based on the findings of the Waterproofing Data and Global Challenges Research Fund Translation Award research projects, which aimed to investigate and rethink the governance of water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. The researchers worked together with school students, teachers, communi...
The Data and Displacement project provides an assessment of the operational and ethical challenges of data-driven humanitarian assistance. Specifically, it focuses on the data-based targeting of humanitarian assistance to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in
camp-like settings across two regions marked by high levels of conflict and displacement...
Extreme weather events are entangled with each other and with other extreme events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-racist protests, drought, a housing crisis, strikes, or climate emergencies, as well as with more general inadequacies due to national, economic, and political upheavals and accreted vulnerabilities from long-term policies or inac...
OpenStreetMap (OSM) has evolved as a popular geospatial dataset for global studies, such as monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, many global applications turn a blind eye on its uneven spatial coverage. We utilized a regression model to infer OSM building completeness within 13,189 urban agglomerations home...
This chapter examines the critical role of data for the localization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa, with a specific focus on SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) in Lagos and Accra. The chapter argues that while the importance of digital technologies and data for the implementation of the SDGs has been acknowledged, d...
Purpose: The study aims to identify the gaps and the potentialities of citizen-generated data in four axes of warning system: (1) risk knowledge, (2) flood forecasting and monitoring, (3) risk communication and (4) flood risk governance.
/Design/methodology/approach: Research inputs for this work were gathered during an international virtual dialo...
Citizen generated data can play an important role in enhancing community resilience. However, the relationship between data and community resilience has only been partly addressed in existing resilience scholarship, predominantly from the perspective of data utilisation in response to unfolding crises. Yet, in this study we attempt to highlight a d...
Although it is acknowledged that urban inequalities can lead to biases in the production of social media data, there is a lack of studies which make an assessment of the effects of intra-urban movements in real-world urban analytics applications, based on social media. This study investigates the spatial heterogeneity of social media with regard to...
Background
Slums or informal settlements characterize most large cities in LMIC. Previous evidence suggests pharmacies may be the most frequently used source of primary care in LMICs but that pharmacy services are of variable quality. However, evidence on pharmacy use and availability is very limited for slum populations.
Methods
We conducted hous...
This paper summarizes key opportunities and challenges identified during the workshop "Social Media for Disaster Risk Management: Researchers Meet Practitioners" which took place online in November 2020. It constitutes a work-in-progress towards identifying new directions for research and development of systems that can better serve the information...
This paper examines OpenStreetMap data quality at different stages of a participatory mapping process in seven slums in Africa and Asia. Data were drawn from an OpenStreetMap-based participatory mapping process developed as part of a research project focusing on understanding inequalities in healthcare access of slum residents in the Global South....
A worldwide increase in the number of people and areas affected by disasters has led to more and more approaches that focus on the integration of local knowledge into disaster risk reduction processes. The research at hand shows a method for formalizing this local knowledge via sketch maps in the context of flooding. The Sketch Map Tool enables not...
This article adapts the ethnographic medium of the diary to develop a method for studying data and related data practices. The article focuses on the creation of one data diary, developed iteratively over three years in the context of a national centre for monitoring disasters and natural hazards in Brazil (Cemaden). We describe four points of focu...
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of humanitarian mapping wi...
This chapter focuses upon the potential of co-production in research linked to risk and resilience. Specifically, it proposes the need to see resilience practice as co-production and illustrates the argument with reflections from the Waterproofing Data project, which investigated water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of d...
This paper traces the expansion of a network of IoT sensors to improve the effectiveness of a centralised control room in Brazil in anticipating natural hazards. This centralised model relies on using IoT data by highly qualified experts replacing previous smaller local structures. We draw on the notion of Situational Awareness to carry out the stu...
We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for efficient resource allocations by government authorities and NGO's, for instance in medical emergencies. We uti...
Introduction
With COVID-19, there is urgency for policymakers to understand and respond to the health needs of slum communities. Lockdowns for pandemic control have health, social and economic consequences. We consider access to healthcare before and during COVID-19 with those working and living in slum communities.
Methods
In seven slums in Bangl...
This study explores the following research questions using OpenStreetMap-based mapping approach and healthcare facility survey from one of seven slums being studied in Africa and Asia. What are the differentials of spatial proximity to health care providers in informal settlements like slum? What are some of the lessons learnt from using OpenStreet...
The spatial analysis of social media data has recently emerged as a significant source of knowledge for urban studies. Most of these analyses are based on an areal unit that is chosen without the support of clear criteria to ensure representativeness with regard to an observed phenomenon. Nonetheless, the results and conclusions that can be drawn f...
The use of digital channels has been promoted by governments as a way of improving services and reducing costs. This article aims to discuss how new forms of exclusion can be created by policies based on a digital-by-default orientation. To this end, more than 1.2 million service records are analyzed, as well as being considered socioeconomic indic...
The private sector arguably plays a critical role in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene and providing potential solutions to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Recently, a myriad of new actors in the form of intermediaries, initiatives and organisations have started driving wider systems change by advocating and ad...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely siloed, and...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely siloed, and...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely silo-ed, and...
Urbanization in the global South has been accompanied by the proliferation of vast informal and marginalized urban areas that lack access to essential services and infrastructure. UN-Habitat estimates that close to a billion people currently live in these deprived and informal urban settlements, generally grouped under the term of urban slums. Two...
This paper presents the main messages of a South American expert roundtable (ERT) on the unintended side effects (unseens) of digital transformation. The input of the ERT comprised 39 propositions from 20 experts representing 11 different perspectives. The two-day ERT discussed the main drivers and challenges as well as vulnerabilities or unseens a...
Exposure to nature is thought to benefit mental health and wellbeing. However, many studies consider greenspace as a single entity, which overlooks the potential significance of the various forms of greenspace, and natural greenspaces in particular. This study was designed to investigate the association between different types of greenspace and men...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely silo-ed, and...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely silo-ed, and...
Ninety percent of the people added to the planet over the next 30 years will live in African and Asian cities, and a large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighborhoods defined by slum conditions, informal settlement, or inadequate housing. The four current approaches to neighborhood deprivation mapping are largely silo-ed, and...
This study examines OpenStreetMap data quality at different stages of a participatory mapping process developed for understanding inequalities in healthcare access of informal urban residents in Africa and Asia. Recent studies have examined quality intrinsically and extrinsically. However, in both cases, the data production processes are often not...
Crowdsourced Geographic Information (CGI) encompasses both “active/conscious” and “passive/unconscious” georeferenced information generated by non-experts. The use of CGI in the domain of flood management is considerably recent and has been motivated by its potential as source of geographic information in situations where authoritative data is scar...
This paper presents results from the application
of a methodological framework developed as part of
an ongoing research project focused on
understanding inequalities in the healthcare access
of slum residents of cities in four countries:
Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan and Nigeria. We
employ a systematic approach to produce, curate and
analyse voluntee...
While local-area greenspace is associated with reduced symptoms of mental distress and greater life satisfaction, most previous research has measured the amount of local-area greenspace within administrative boundaries, and found mixed results for associations between greenspace and multidimensional mental wellbeing. The study was designed to exami...
Background:
Household surveys are a key epidemiological, medical, and social research method. In poor urban environments, such as slums, censuses can often be out-of-date or fail to record transient residents, maps may be incomplete, and access to sites can be limit, all of which prohibits obtaining an accurate sampling frame. This article describ...
Despite an estimated one billion people around the world living in slums, most surveys of health and well-being do not distinguish between slum and non-slum urban residents. Identifying people who live in slums is important for research purposes and also to enable policymakers, programme managers, donors and non-governmental organisations to better...
Recent research studies have made clear that citizen sensing projects are ridden with an ambivalent character. From one perspective, the production of data by citizens is associated with empowerment: digital technologies can enable citizens to produce data that reflects alternative and counter-hegemonic views of the world, and thus lead to the open...
The growing use of digital media in the workplace is shifting work to digital platforms, this study explores the role of the physical office space in modern organisations where digital work is the norm. We capture the way in which digital media modulates the production of space by tracing the physical and digital interactions of a software developm...
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as an important additional source of information for improving the resilience of cities and communities in the face of natural hazards and extreme weather events. This chapter summarizes the existing research in this area and offers an interdisciplinary perspective of the challenges to be overcom...
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures deve...
Social media is a valuable source of information for different domains , since users share their opinion and knowledge in (near) real-time. Moreover , users usually use different words to refer to a particular event (e.g., a rain event). These words may be later employed to filter social media messages regarding new occurrences of the event and, th...
This demonstration presents a social media crawler based on an architectural model formed of two artifacts-a conceptual architecture and a class diagram. The social media crawler, called 'crawler-twitter' 1 , is highly scalable in terms of its links with social media APIs and was designed in accordance with the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern....
Digital working is often seen to be replacing office-based work practices. This study captures the opposite, the entanglement of features of both physical and digital by software development teams in a multinational IT company. We observed how these software development teams crafted three types of entangled workspaces, characterised by different m...
Increasing situational awareness using social media data is still a problem for the surveillance of disaster-related events due to the amount of data. In order to address this problem, a number of studies have been conducted on the basis of the Tobler's first law of geography, in which social media messages nearest to events are more relevant than...
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures deve...
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures deve...
Urban Resilience has recently emerged as a systematic approach to urban sustainability. The malleable definition of resilience has rendered its operationalisation an intriguing task for contemporary cities trying to address their organisational problems and confront uncertainty in a holistic manner. In this article we investigate the implementation...
This paper presents results from the application of a methodological framework developed as part of an ongoing research project focused on understanding inequalities in the healthcare access of slum residents of cities in four countries: Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan and Nigeria. We employ a systematic approach to produce, curate and analyse voluntee...
Introduction
The view that interacting with nature enhances mental wellbeing is commonplace, despite a dearth of evidence or even agreed definitions of ‘nature’. The aim of this review was to systematically appraise the evidence for associations between greenspace and mental wellbeing, stratified by the different ways in which greenspace has been c...
Heatmap of risk of bias for studies evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale adapted for cross-sectional studies.
(DOCX)
Heatmap of risk of bias for studies evaluated using the Cochrane RoB 2.0 tool.
(DOCX)
PRISMA 2009 checklist.
(DOC)
Emerging data sources have been increasing the amount of available and useful data, which have a potential for revolutionizing entire business processes and decisions in several scenarios, e.g., smart cities. However, at the same time that these "big data" open further opportunities, the heterogeneity of their features often hampers the integration...
The paper designs an automated valuation model to predict the price of residential property in Coventry, United Kingdom, and achieves this by means of geostatistical Kriging, a popularly employed distance-based learning method. Unlike traditional applications of distance-based learning, this papers implements non-Euclidean distance metrics by appro...
Several crowdsourcing-based systems have been employed to gather information from individuals in natural disaster domain. These systems have a great diversity of users, making their usability an important aspect. This work aims at understanding what users' needs are and designing a new interface for the Citizen Observatory of Floods. We employed an...
In this article, based on of open legislative data mining, we propose a methodology to create a model capable of indicating which characteristics have a positive or negative impact on the approval of a bill by the Chamber of Deputies. Added to the explanatory capacity, the model can also predict whether a bill will be approved or not. The model was...
The increasing number of sensors used in diverse applications has provided a massive number of continuous, unbounded, rapid data and requires the management of distinct protocols, interfaces and intermittent connections. As traditional sensor networks are error-prone and difficult to maintain, the study highlights the emerging role of “citizens as...
Crowd sensing data (also known as crowdsourcing) are of great significance to support flood risk management. With the growing volume of available data in the past few years, researchers have used in situ sensor data to filter and prioritize volunteers' information. Nevertheless, stationary, in situ sensors are only capable of monitoring a limited r...
The growing use of crowdsourced geographic information (CGI) hasprompted the employment of several methods for assessing information quality, which are aimed at addressing concerns on the lack of quality of the information provided by non-experts. In this work, we propose a taxonomy of methods for assessing the quality of CGI when no reference data...
Business process modelling languages do not usually represent non-functional requirements, focusing only on the functional ones. In order to fill this gap, the StrAli-BPM (strategic alignment with BPM) approach was presented. StrAli-BPM is divided in BLA@BPMN and BLA2SLA: the former extends BPMN to embody non-functional requirements through busines...
These are the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information and
Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM), hosted by the Chair for
Information Systems and Supply Chain Management and ERCIS Competence Center for Crisis Management at the University of Münster.
Information and Communication Technologies have become k...
The tasks of disaster risk monitoring and early warning are an important means of improving the efficiency of disaster response and preparedness. However, although the current works in this area have sought to provide a more accurate and better technological infrastructure of systems to support these tasks, they have failed to examine key features...
The idea on Linked Open Data (LOD) for Disaster Management was stimulated by the experience with the integration of heterogeneous environmental data based on well-known OGC based web services. A lot of spatial data is available 'via the Web' - but not “really on the web': many datasets can be viewed, queried and downloaded via web services, but it...
Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as an important additional source of information for improving the resilience of cities and communities in the face of natural hazards and extreme weather events. This chapter summarizes the existing research in this area and offers an interdisciplinary perspective of the challenges to be overcom...