Strategic Professional Development Program for Young Researchers
Top Runner Development Program Engaging Universities,
National Labs, and Companies
Strategic Professional Development Program for Young Researchers
Top Runner Development Program Engaging Universities,
National Labs, and Companies
Assistant Professor
Institute of Systems and Information Engineering
University of Tsukuba
Yohei Shida received his B.S. in Physics from Tokyo University of Science in 2017, his M.S. in Mathematical and Computing Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2019, and his Ph.D. in Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in December 2022. Since January 2023, he has been an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the Institute of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, where he is the PI of the Shida Laboratory. He also serves as a Science Tokyo Research Fellow at the School of Computing, Institute of Science Tokyo.
This project analyzes and models collective regularities in human behavior using GPS mobility data. Sociophysics and econophysics seek to identify, analyze, and model regularities that commonly emerge across seemingly different social phenomena, including financial markets, information diffusion on social media, human mobility, and consumption behavior. My previous work has examined common human mobility patterns and scaling relations in urban regions, urban potential fields that shape human movement, and contact-based epidemic models, thereby characterizing relationships among urban structure, human mobility, and contact patterns.
The project will further analyze and model how the use of urban space varies across different groups and over time by incorporating attribute information into GPS mobility data. It will also focus on relationships among urban areas connected through human mobility to characterize urban usage patterns and their temporal variation.
This perspective is not limited to GPS mobility data. The project will generate and evaluate synthetic GPS mobility data that preserve collective structures observed in real data, with the aim of designing mobility data that can be used without directly sharing individual mobility histories. The research will also extend to pedestrian behavior, consumption, and purchasing behavior, allowing common structures and regularities across diverse forms of human behavior to be examined through a cross-data perspective.
My goal as a transborder researcher is to create new research questions by connecting different types of data, real-world settings, organizations, and countries while maintaining a clear disciplinary core. What I find most compelling about sociophysics and econophysics is that they allow us to examine seemingly different social phenomena, such as financial markets, information diffusion on social media, human mobility, and consumption and purchasing behavior, from a common perspective. Even when the subject changes, phenomena emerging from human choices and interactions can be analyzed and modeled in terms of their underlying regularities.
I have mainly studied regularities in urban mobility using GPS mobility data. However, I do not see my research as being limited to GPS mobility data. Building on the perspective developed through GPS mobility research, I aim to expand my research to synthetic GPS mobility data, pedestrian behavior, and consumption and purchasing behavior. I also aim to identify research questions not only in the topics I currently envision, but also in new data and real-world settings that I will encounter in the future.
To do so, it is necessary not only to analyze new data, but also to collaborate with organizations that hold different types of data, domestic and international collaborators, students, and research collaborators, and to transform data and real-world settings into academically meaningful research questions while taking practical constraints into account. As the PI of the Shida Laboratory, I aim to connect people, data, and research questions, moving between deepening my expertise and expanding it across domains.
In Preparation.