Dr Emmanouil Tranos, of the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, describes, in 60 seconds, his research into the geographical distribution of the digital economy.
60 seconds with Dr Emmanouil Tranos
I am Emmanouil Tranos, an economic geographer at the University of Birmingham. I am interested in the geographical distribution of the digital economy and in the use of big data to better understand cities and regions.
The digital infrastructure, which includes the hardware of the Internet, is the backbone of the digital economy and is unequally distributed across places reflecting both past and current spatial development patterns. In addition, the complete infiltration of digital technologies in our society has resulted in the creation of a huge pool of big data, capturing almost every aspect of human activity and enabling urban and regional analysts to model human dynamics very precisely in space and time.
My research uses big data from mobile phone operators and other digital sources to model and explain these patterns as well as the impact of the digital infrastructure on city and regional development. If our aim is to plan 'smarter' cities, then big data analytics must be an essential part of the modern geographer's toolkit.
Dr Emmanouil Tranos' profile