The transportation of people and goods has been necessary in any society for thousands of years. In modern times, transportation has become a foundation component of human activity. A great deal of problems related to traffic and transportation have been ingeniously resolved in the past and perhaps an even greater number of problems will have to be overcome in the future. Now it has been realiz...

Cities today are strained by the exponential growth in population where they are homes to the majority of world's population. Understanding the complexities underlying the emerging behaviors of human travel patterns on the city level is essential toward making informed decision-making pertaining to urban transportation infrastructures This thesis includes several attempts towards modeling and u...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization recognises the importance of natural environments for human health. Evidence for natural environment-health associations comes largely from single countries or regions, with varied approaches to measuring natural environment exposure. We present a standardised approach to measuring neighbourhood natural environment exposure in cities in different regions...

I dentifying critical issues confronting an urban sociology of the twenty-first century entails a decision and a judgment, both in turn inevitably derived from an interpretation of history in the making. The enterprise is, thus, partial and positioned. Developing analytical and empirical elements (and I emphasize elements) for an urban sociology focused on the early twenty-first century does no...

With the rise of Social Media, people obtain and share information almost instantly on a 24/7 basis. Many research areas have tried to gain valuable insights from these large volumes of freely available user generated content. The research areas of intelligent transportation systems and smart cities are no exception. However, extracting meaningful and actionable knowledge from user generated co...

As the sharing economy has been increasing dramatically in the world, the mobile-hailed ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft in the US, Didi Chuxing in China has begun to challenge traditional public transportation providers such as bus, subway or taxis. Ridesharing companies have shown their ability to provide the mobility services where public transit has failed. The human mobility demand...

Steering traffic in cities is a very complex task, since improving efficiency involves the coordination of many actors. Traditional approaches attempt to optimize traffic lights for a particular density and configuration of traffic. The disadvantage of this lies in the fact that traffic densities and configurations change constantly. Traffic seems to be an adaptation problem rather than an opti...

After Christians, Muslims represent the largest religious grouping in the UK. According to census statistics, there are approximately 1.6 million Muslims in the UK, approximately 54% of who were born outside of the UK. There has been emerging interest in the use of traditional healers by South Asians in the UK. Early studies by Aslam3 and Healey & Aslam4 focused upon health seeking behaviour am...

Cities are fast becoming new territories of violence. The humanitarian consequences of many criminally violent urban settings are comparable to those of more traditional wars, yet despite the intensity of the needs, humanitarian aid to such settings is limited. The way in which humanitarian needs are typically defined, fails to address the problems of these contexts, the suffering they produce ...