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Egypt: Big Data and Urban Mobility
June 2, 2014Cairo, Egypt
The World Bank Group is organizing a one-day round table to discuss the use of big data in urban mobility.

The World Bank Group is organizing a one-day round table to discuss the use of big data in urban mobility.

Big Data can be defined as a vast collection of structured and unstructured data sets that have become difficult to process using traditional data processing tools due to the volume and complexity of the data.

Big Data may come from mobile phone call logs, mobile-banking transactions, online user-generated content—such as blog posts and Tweets, online searches, and satellite images. Turning Big Data into actionable information is based on computational techniques that bring trends and patterns within and between extremely large datasets.

The event aims at increasing the awareness and understanding of data analytics related to urban transport among decision makers. There is growing consensus that data analytics can help improve traffic congestion in corridors and reduce greenhouse emission from transport and support climate change in the long term.

The meeting is a platform of collaboration bringing together Egyptian experts as well as experts from other regions of the world to present and discuss their findings.

9:00-9:15 AM          Opening remarks

9:15-9:45 AM           World Bank presentation

Jacqueline Dubow, TWICT, World Bank

9:45-10:30 AM         Bangalore case study, India

Dr. Ashwin Mahesh, CEO, Mapunity Information Services

10:30-10:45 AM      Break

10:45-11:30 AM      AllAboard experience, Ivory Coast

Rahul Nair, Manager, Transportation Analytics, IBM Research

11:30-12:15 PM       Cairo transportation and big data

Dr. Hisham El-Shishiny, Chief Scientist, IBM, Cairo

Dr.  Ahmed Mosa, Adviser, Ministry of Transport, Cairo

Dr. Ahmed Hazem-El-Mahdy, Professor, E-just University, Cairo

12:15-12:45 PM       Questions & Answers

                                   Break-out sessions;

1)    Knowing the City

2)    Informing the City

3)    Imagining the City

4)    Empowering the City

12:45-1:30 PM                  Lunch

1:30-3:45 PM           Break-out sessions

3:45-4:15 PM           Break

4:15-5:15 PM           Presentation of groups’ proposals

5:15-5:30 PM           closing remarks

  • Ms. Jacqueline Dubow

    Ms. Jacqueline Dubow is a Senior International Development Expert. From 1995 to 2012, she held senior positions with the World Bank Group in Washington, DC. She has advised governments and companies on both operational and strategic matters, principally in the health, education, new technologies and transport sectors. Her areas of expertise within these sectors span large poverty reduction projects, government policy, institutional development, investment project preparation, regulatory development, and strategic planning. In the course of these assignments, Mrs. Dubow has led complex multidisciplinary project teams of up to 30 consultants. During her 30+ years of experience, she has worked in more than 40 countries around the world, including Africa, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She was a resident in West Africa for over 12 years. Ms. Dubow’s professional experience embraces both the public and private sectors. She began her career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, where she worked primarily on educational projects in West Africa, including a comprehensive reform of the basic education system of the Seychelles. Other professional engagements include designing HIV/AIDS prevention communication strategies in Africa for the World Health Organization and managing a worldwide HIV/AIDS communication and behavioral change program for Family Health International, a U.S. non-profit organization. Ms. Dubow received a Master of Sciences in mass communications from Boston University. Previously, she completed a Master of Education and a Master of the Arts, both at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France. She speaks fluent French, English, and Creole, and is proficient in German and Greek.

  • Dr. Hisham El-Shishiny

    Dr. Hisham El-Shishiny is chief scientist, IBM Master Inventor and Manager of Advanced Technology and Cairo Center for Advanced Studies at IBM Egypt. He is also the World-Wide Leader of IBM Centers for Advanced Studies (25 centers around the globe). He received his B.Sc. in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Cairo University in 1972, and his Doctorate degree in Computer Science from Henri Poincare, Nancy 1 University in France in 1978. Dr. El-Shishiny is the recipient of five IBM Plateau Invention Achievement Awards, IBM Outstanding Innovation Award and IBM High Value Patent Application Award. He is an inventor or co-inventor of 22 granted and filed patents and authors of more than 50 technical papers in reputable journals and conferences. Dr. El-Shishiny is a member of the IEEE and ACM. His current research interests include High Performance Computing (HPC), Advanced Imaging Technology, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management and Bioinformatics.

  • Dr. Ashwin Mahesh

    Dr. Ashwin Mahesh is a technologist and public policy researcher who studies the way cities are growing in India, and the implications for managing them. Dr. Mahesh has been a faculty and researcher with the Centre for Public Policy at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and is now a member of the Executive Council at the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transport and Urban Planning at the Indian Institute of Science. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. He was a member of the Agenda for Bangalore Infrastructure and Development Task Force between 2009 and 2013, and also served as the Urban Research Strategist for the Government of Karnataka. In these capacities, he co-authored the urban development policy of the State, and also PlanBengaluru 2020, a vision document for the metropolitan capital region. Dr. Mahesh conceptualised and helped implement Bangalore's popular Big10 bus service, and has also helped steer many of the digital initiatives of the Bangalore Traffic Police. He also pioneered the community-managed restoration of lakes in the city, and is part of a team working to develop a new regime for solid waste management, based on segregation at source, recycling, and producer responsibilities. He researches the potential for urban governance to be strengthened through collaboration between public officials and citizens. How much of what we expect our governments to do can be done by us instead? And how would our choices be different if we imagined government not only for the people and of the people, but also BY the people themselves? Based on his experiences of working on different development initiatives in Bangalore, he believes that in fact there is much that citizens themselves can do to foster development, and that in the age of technology, this possibility presents a new opportunity to rethink government itself. Dr. Mahesh is the editor of India Together, the national public affairs and development magazine. He co-founded and leads the social technology lab, Mapunity, which works to apply technology to tackle developmental challenges. He is an Ashoka Fellow for social entrepreneurship, and is an advisor to many government departments on a range of urban development issues.

  • Dr. Ahmed Mosa

    Dr. Ahmed Mosa received his degrees in transportation engineering, economics and environmental studies (M.Sc., Ph.D.) from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Mosa has over 12 years of experience that combines research/academic knowledge and practical experience. He is a proven research leader who has shown attention to detail and project tracking skills that are necessary for the successful and timely completion of this project. Throughout his education and research career, he won several awards, authored and co-authored more than 35 refereed conference and journal papers, and attended major transportation conferences. Moreover, Dr. Mosa participated in several transportation projects in Egypt and Japan. Dr. Mosa’s research has mainly focused on the development of analytical methods for modelling and understanding travel behaviour, and its implications in the overall urban context. . He is a pioneer studying the impacts of Information and Telecommunication Technologies (ICTs) on transportation and travel behaviour, future mobility, modelling the Interdependence of Social Network Interactions and spatial choices, public transport planning, intelligent transport systems, traffic simulation models, multi agent systems, household interactions, Negotiation models, Human activity-travel behaviour and urban planning. He has also focused on the relevance of understanding travel demand as derived from the people’s need for performing activities, and the relationship between people’s travel decisions and other key aspects of their lives, such as their use of information and communication technologies, and the characteristics of their urban environment. Furthermore, he has focused on studying how changes in land use patterns are related to the transportation system, focusing both on existing empirical evidence as well as on methods to analyse this relationship.

  • Rahul Nair

    Rahul Nair leads the Transportation Analytics group at the Smarter Cities Technology Centre of IBM Research - Ireland. He received a Ph.D. in transportation systems from the University of Maryland College Park and holds a Masters of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His dissertation work on new mobility alternatives to alleviate urban congestion, and was co-awarded the Best Dissertation Presentation Award by the Transportation Research Board Network Modelling Committee. He has over 20 technical papers in top-tier transportation research journals. Mr. Nair was previously with the Centre for Advanced Transportation Technology, where he developed tools for performance measures using Bluetooth and probe data for the Maryland State and Federal Highway Administrations. His expertise is in the area of transport systems include network modelling, stochastic optimisation, systems analysis of innovative and sustainable mobility solutions.At IBM Research - Ireland he focuses on multimodal management from the perspective of users, where optimization problems with noisy and uncertain inputs are studied to improve urban mobility.
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