Kent Larson

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT

Understanding human behavior in built environments is critical for designing functional, user centered urban spaces. Traditional approaches, such as manual observations, surveys, and simplified simulations, often fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of real world behavior. To address these limitations, we introduce TravelAgent, a novel simul...

In mobility-on-demand services, the number of vehicles needed is often determined by peak demand during rush hours, leading to prolonged vehicle idle times during off-peak periods. This surplus capacity presents an opportunity for vehicles to perform additional tasks, potentially enhancing system efficiency and reducing the overall number of vehicl...

Data generated by users on digital platforms are a crucial resource for advocates and researchers interested in uncovering digital inequities, auditing algorithms, and understanding human behavior. Yet data access is often restricted. How can researchers both effectively and ethically collect user data? This paper shares an innovative approach to c...

In recent years, the rapid growth of on-demand delivery services, especially in food deliveries, has spurred the exploration of innovative mobility solutions. In this context, lightweight autonomous vehicles have emerged as a potential alternative. However, their fleet-level behavior remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we have develope...

This is a first-of-its-kind dataset containing detailed purchase histories from 5027 U.S. Amazon.com consumers, spanning 2018 through 2022, with more than 1.8 million purchases. Consumer spending data are customarily collected through government surveys to produce public datasets and statistics, which serve public agencies and researchers. Companie...

This work presents the design and fabrication of MAIA, an open-source, modular, low-cost, and portable bioreactor for democratizing the development of synthetic biology based projects for urban settings. The integration of open-source synthetic biology (synbio) tools in a city’s infrastructure planning and design is crucial for addressing the great...

In mobility-on-demand services, the number of vehicles needed is often determined by peak demand during rush hours, leading to prolonged vehicle idle times during off-peak periods. This surplus capacity presents an opportunity for vehicles to perform additional tasks, potentially enhancing system efficiency and reducing the overall number of vehicl...

Community centers play a crucial role in urban environments, providing physical and educational services to their surrounding communities, particularly for students. Among the many benefits for students are enhanced academic outcomes, improvement of behavioral problems, and increased school attendance. Such centers are also particularly vital for l...

Rapid urbanization has intensified pressures on global water systems, particularly impacting informal settlements. Understanding water usage patterns within these settlements is of importance for better addressing water scarcity issues. Current methods for gaining information about water within these settings tend to lack spatio-temporal granularit...

Urban vibrancy is a topic of great concern in the field of urban design and planning. However, the definition and measurement of urban vibrancy have not been consistently and clearly followed. With the development of technologies such as big data and machine learning, urban planners have adopted new methods that enable better quantitative evaluatio...

Rapid urbanization has intensified pressures on global water systems, particularly impacting informal settlements. Understanding water usage patterns within these settlements is of importance for better addressing water scarcity issues. Current methods for gaining information about water within these settings tend to lack spatio-temporal granularit...

Reducing consumption of animal products is a critically important challenge in efforts to mitigate the climate crisis. Despite this, meals containing animal products are often presented as the default versus more environmentally sustainable vegetarian or vegan options. We tested whether vegetarian and vegan labels on menu items negatively impact th...

Fast urbanization and climate change require innovative systems for an efficient movement of people and goods in cities. As trends towards vehicle-sharing, autonomous vehicles, and the use of micro-mobility systems gain strength, the intersection of these fields appears as an area of great opportunity. Autonomy could potentially bring the convenien...

Autonomous bicycles have recently been proposed as a new and more efficient approach to bicycle-sharing systems (BSS), but their environmental impacts remain unresearched. Conducting environmental impact assessments at an early technological stage is critical to influencing the design and, ultimately, environmental impacts of a system. Consequently...

This study proposes the use of agent-based simulation as an alternative to space syntax, a common technique in architecture, to reveal how architectural design can influence scientific collaboration. Using the Media Lab building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus as a case study, we use the Gama-platform to implement a parsimonious...

COVID-19 profoundly affected how communities live, work, and commute. In particular, reductions in commutes caused reductions in commuter-related emissions. The pandemic also prompted businesses and institutions to consider longer-term adjustments, including work-from-home policies that continue beyond pandemic protocols. If properly evaluated and...

Compartmental models are often used to understand and predict the progression of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. The most basic of these models consider the total population of a region to be closed. Many incorporate human mobility into their transmission dynamics, usually based on static and aggregated data. However, mobility can change dr...

Autonomous bicycles have recently been proposed as a new and more efficient approach to bicycle-sharing systems (BSS), but the corresponding environmental implications remain unresearched. Conducting environmental impact assessments at an early technological stage is critical to influencing the design and, ultimately, environmental impacts of a sys...

This paper describes the latest advancements in the Housing and Mobility Mode Choice module of CityScope, a data-driven tangible platform developed by MIT City Science (CS) to facilitate more participatory decision-making processes. The ultimate objective of the Module is to easily predict people’s reactions to potential urban disruptions and polic...

The global Covid-19 pandemic has raised many questions about how we occupy and move in the built environment. Interior environments have been increasingly discussed in numerous studies highlighting how interior spaces play a key role in the spread of pandemics. One societal challenge is to find short-term strategies to reopen indoor venues. Most cu...

Location data collected from mobile devices represent mobility behaviors at individual and societal levels. These data have important applications ranging from transportation planning to epidemic modeling. However, issues must be overcome to best serve these use cases: The data often represent a limited sample of the population and use of the data...

La falta de datos en las áreas informales de las ciudades es una gran limitación para la gestión de políticas públicas, afectando a todos los ámbitos de la gestión, desde la capacidad de hacer un buen diagnóstico de los problemas en la población más vulnerable, hasta la evaluación de la efectividad de los programas de desarrollo. Esta monografía ab...

Compartmental models are often used to understand and predict the progression of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. The most basic of these models consider the total population of a region to be closed. Many incorporate human mobility into their transmission dynamics, usually based on static and aggregated data. However, mobility can change dr...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, non- pharmaceutical interventions, such as mobility restrictions, have been globally adopted as critically important strategies to curb the spread of infection. However, such interventions come with immense social and economic costs and the relative effectiveness of different mobility restrictions are not well unde...

Distributed forces on a surface can reveal information about the interaction between an object and its surrounding environment. Sensors can be embedded in sporting equipment to measure the response of the apparatus to forces generated by an athlete. In the case of snow skis, these measurements can be used for purposes of enhancing product developme...

As cities become increasingly populated, urban planning plays a key role in ensuring the equitable and inclusive development of metropolitan areas. MIT City Science group created a data-driven tangible platform, CityScope, to help different stakeholders, such as government representatives, urban planners, developers, and citizens, collaboratively s...

As cities become increasingly populated, urban planning plays a key role in ensuring the equitable and inclusive development of metropolitan areas. MIT City Science group created a data-driven tangible platform, CityScope, to help different stakeholders, such as government representatives, urban planners, developers, and citizens, collaboratively s...

The current trends towards vehicle-sharing, electrification, and autonomy are predicted to transform mobility. Combined appropriately, they have the potential of significantly improving urban mobility. However, what will come after most vehicles are shared, electric, and autonomous remains an open question, especially regarding the interactions bet...

Rethinking cities is now more imperative than ever, as society is facing challenges such as population growth and climate change. The design of cities can not be abstracted from the design of its mobility system, and, therefore, efficient solutions must be found to transport people and goods throughout the city in an ecological way. An autonomous b...

The current trends towards vehicle-sharing, electrification, and autonomy are predicted to transform mobility. Combined appropriately, they have the potential of significantly improving urban mobility. However, what will come after most vehicles are shared, electric, and autonomous remains an open question, especially regarding the interactions bet...

The global Covid-19 pandemic has raised many questions about how we occupy and move about in the built environment. Interior environments have been increasingly discussed in numerous studies highlighting how interior spaces play a key key in the spread of pandemics , especially in winter months when people spend most of their time in closed spaces....

A combination of Telecom tracking data, Instagram posts, and a summary of data extracted from person-counting sensors and vehicle parking records were utilized to simulate and evaluate scenarios transferring cruise passengers from Hamburg Central Station to several cruise terminals.

In the absence of effective vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as mobility restrictions, were globally adopted as critically important strategies for curbing the spread of COVID-19. However, such interventions come with immense social and economic costs and the relative effectiveness of different mobility restrictions are not well und...

Zapopan, in Guadalajara (Mexico). The goal was to understand where and how often women avoid public spaces as a result of perceived threats in their close environment. Our research explores the dynamics of social conditions within informal communities, and fills a void created by an absence of standard definitions of insecurity and any specific mea...

In the past years, mobility trends in cities around the world have been pushing for safer, greener, and more efficient transportation systems. This shift in mobility trends creates an opportunity for using mobile lightweight infrastructure, such as bicycles, as a generator of knowledge that will benefit commuters alongside the environmental and soc...

Irrigation systems contribute worldwide to the provision of a wide range of services on which the survival and well-being of humanity depend. They are of primary importance in Vietnam where about 90% of the water used is for irrigation and aquaculture and where agriculture is the largest employer and a major contributor to the national GDP and to t...

The MIT Media Lab City Science Group reshapes and reevaluates well-being as an emerging key indicator due the social challenges that cities are facing, such as inequality, police violence, and breaches to safety and security. Well-being in urban environments has been studied extensively, yet most research focuses on one aspect of well-being rather...

We present a system to coordinate 'urban mobility swarms' in order to promote the use and safety of lightweight, sustainable transit, while enhancing the vibrancy and community fabric of cities. This work draws from behavior exhibited by swarms of nocturnal insects, such as crickets and fireflies, whereby synchrony unifies individuals in a decentra...

We present a system to coordinate “urban mobility swarms” in order to promote the use and safety of lightweight, sustainable transit, while enhancing the vibrancy and community fabric of cities. This work draws from behavior exhibited by swarms of nocturnal insects, such as crickets and fireflies, whereby synchrony unifies individuals in a decentra...

Governments and researchers around the world are implementing digital contact tracing solutions to stem the spread of infectious disease, namely COVID-19. Many of these solutions threaten individual rights and privacy. Our goal is to break past the false dichotomy of effective versus privacy-preserving contact tracing. We offer an alternative appro...

Harbors are complex sociotechnical systems in which several agents are involved. The Port City Model (PCM) is a project that investigates multimodal land transportation related to cruise tourism, focusing on comfort and efficiency from the user perspective. To do so, it combines data analysis and visualization with simulation of future scenarios. T...

The perception of safety in public spaces has important effects on the behavior of pedestrians, and this is usually parallel to the reality of safety itself. Policy makers and community leaders still lack measurable and comprehensible tools to better understand and improve safety. We propose an agent-based model (ABM) as a tool to simulate the beha...

Urban cycling is often a solitary pursuit, as many cities do not provide infrastructure to facilitate social cycling, such as protected bike lanes. Negotiating congested streets can be stressful, even under the best conditions. The challenges of obstacle avoidance are amplified at night, when reduced visibility increases the risk of collision. In o...

A fundamental aspect of well performing cities is successful public spaces. For centuries, understanding these places has been limited to sporadic observations and laborious data collection. This study proposes a novel methodology to analyze citywide, discrete urban spaces using highly accurate anonymized telecom data and machine learning algorithm...

The impact of city-planning on mobility habits of urban dwellers has been proven crucial to well functioning cities. Nevertheless, the correlation between discrete urban interventions and metropolitan scale mobility mode-choices (MC) is challenging to predict and communicate. This paper presents the design and deployment of 'MoCho', a real-time MC...

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), drones and robots will revolutionize our way of travelling and understanding urban space. In order to operate, all of these devices are expected to collect and analyze a lot of sensitive data about our daily activities. However, current operational models for these devices have extensively relied on centralized models of...

Vibrant public spaces which consistently attract dense and diverse populations while hosting continuous social activity are an integral part of any successful urban district. The design of such places has motivated the efforts of urban planners and decision makers for centuries. In recent decades, data-driven and analytical approaches to evaluate t...

High-resolution individual geolocation data passively collected from mobile phones is increasingly sold in private markets and shared with researchers. This data poses significant security, privacy, and ethical risks: it's been shown that users can be re-identified in such datasets, and its collection rarely involves their full consent or knowledge...

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), drones and robots will revolutionize our way of travelling and understanding urban space. In order to operate, all of these devices are expected to collect and analyze a lot of sensitive data about our daily activities. However, current operational models for these devices have extensively relied on centralized models of...

This paper presents a data-driven agent-based simulation of individual mobility based on spatio-temporal data from mobile phones. The model developed is embedded within the CityScope framework, a platform used as decision support system for urban planning. This work analyzes the Andorra visitors' flow and traffic congestion through an agent-based v...

In this study we show how Call Detail Record (CDR) can be used to better understand the travel patterns of visitors. We show how Origin-Destination (OD) Interactive Maps can provide transportation information through CDR. We then use aggregation of CDR to show the differences between the travel patterns of visitors from different countries and of d...

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to b...

2019 IEEE. Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are ex...

This paper describes the conception, development and deployment of a novel HCI system for public participation and decision making. This system was applied for the process of allocating refugee accommodation in the City of Hamburg within the FindingPlaces project in 2016. The CityScope a rapid prototyping platform for urban planning and decision ma...

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to b...

Mobility is a key issue for city planners. Being able to evaluate the impact of its evolution is complex and involves many factors including new technologies like electric cars, autonomous vehicles and also new social habits like vehicle sharing. We need a better understanding of different scenarios to improve the quality of long-term decisions. Co...

MIT City Science Group (CS) studies the interaction of social, economic and physical characteristics of urban areas to understand how people use and experience cities with the goal of improving urban design practices to facilitate consensus between stakeholders. Long-established processes of engagement around urban transformation have been reliant...

Mobility is a key issue for city planners. Being able to evaluate the impact of its evolution is complex and involves many factors including new technologies like electric cars, autonomous vehicles and also new social habits like vehicle sharing. We need a better understanding of different scenarios to improve the quality of long-term decisions. Co...

This study proposes a novel information visualization approach developed and deployed in the state of Andorra. We present a framework to analyze and represent the flow of people through a multi-level interactive and tangible agent-based visualization. The presented framework, developed to understand Andorra visitor behavior, is embedded in the MIT...

Processes of urban planning, urban design and architecture are inherently tangible, iterative and collaborative. Nevertheless, the majority of tools in these fields offer virtual environments and single user experience. This paper presents CityScopeAR: a computational-tangible mixed-reality platform designed for collaborative urban design processes...