Marta C. Gonzalez

Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning

Specializations

Statistical Physics of Complex Systems and Network Science founded my scientific approach, Spatial AI, digital traces, and Environmental data, keep me busy.

Education

PhD Physics 2003-2006, Stuttgart Universitat, Germany. "Contact Networks of Mobile Agents and Spreading Dynamics" Thesis adviser: Hans Herrmann (now at ETH Zurich)

M.Sc. Physics 1999-2001, Central University of Venezuela. "Renormalization approach to solve two-phase flow in porous media" Thesis adviser: Mariela (Freski) Araujo (now at Shell, Texas area)

Bachelor Physics 1992-1999, Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela. "Phase-space tomography of the truncated harmonic oscillator states" Thesis adviser: Celso Luis Ladera

Philosophy Statement

Year after year, the urgency grows: a disparate quality of life and quality of services in urban populations, inflict adverse impact on our natural and social environments. Unaffordable housing, acute pollution, power outage and congested travel are some of the challenges at hand. In the years to come, my goal is to educate future generations and to continue developing a flexible research agenda to understand, address, and reverse the negative effects in the most challenged cities.

Our research approach is based on spatial analysis, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built environment and their social networks. A complex systems approach, with statistical physics methods empowered by AI, seeking to understand macroscopic phenomena in terms of the microscopic dynamics of the various systems. We convert data into knowledge to guide interventions and planning of cities.

Biography

Marta C. Gonzalez is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

With the support of several companies, cities and foundations, her research team develops computer models to analyze digital traces of information mediated by devices. They process this information to manage the demand in urban infrastructures in relation to energy and mobility. Her recent research uses billions of mobile phone records to understand the appearance of traffic jams and the integration of electric vehicles into the grid, smart meter data records to compare the policy of solar energy adoption and card transactions to identify habits in spending behavior.

Prior to joining Berkeley, Marta worked as an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a member of the Operations Research Center and the Center for Advanced Urbanism. She is a member of the scientific council of technology companies such as Gran Data, PTV and the Pecan Street Project consortium.

Courses Taught

CE 88: Data Science for Smart Cities

CYPLAN 257: Data Science for Human Mobility and Socio-Technical Systems

CYPLAN 290: Urban Systems and Network Science

CE 263N: Scalable Spatial Analysis

Awards + Recognition

Selected speaker by the U.S. National Academies to Sackler Colloquium on Visualization and Modelling on advances of Science and Technology (2017)

Selected by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, as the organizer of the Smart Cities symposium for of the Fifth Arab American Frontiers meeting (2017)

Scientfic Advisory Board Member of PTV AG, leading software solutions and consulting services for traffic and transportation (2017-2018).

UN Foundation award to study consumption patterns of women and girl in the developing world (2016)

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world (2016)

Invited Speaker, National Academy of Sciences meeting on "Data-driven City Planning and Policy," from the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (2016)

Winner of the MIT-Philips Lighting Grand Challenge (w. Post-doc) (2016)

Invited Speaker, National Academy of Engineering meeting -AAES Convocation of the Professional

Engineering Societies on "Big Data in Civil Engineering" (2015)

1st Prize MIT Big Data Transportation Challenge "Prediction Algorithms" (w. Students) (2013)

2nd Prize, MIT Big Data Transportation Challenge "Visualization Platform." (w. Student) (2013)

Best Paper Award in the ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Urban Computing, KDD'13, Chicago. (w. Students)

Selected Publications

A Salgado, W Li, F Alhasoun, I Caridi, M Gonzalez, Street context of various demographic groups in their daily mobility, Applied Network Science 6 (1), 1-14 (2021)

Y Xu, LE Olmos, S Abbar, MC González, Deconstructing laws of accessibility and facility distribution in cities, Science Advances 6 (37), eabb4112 (2020)

A data science framework for planning the growth of bicycle infrastructures LE Olmos, MS Tadeo, D Vlachogiannis, F Alhasoun, XE Alegre, C Ochoa, Felipe Targa, Marta C González, Transportation research part C: emerging technologies 115, 102640 (2020)

Barbour, Edward, Carlos Cerezo Davila, Siddharth Gupta, Christoph Reinhart, Jasleen Kaur, and Marta C. González. “Planning for sustainable cities by estimating building occupancy with mobile phones.” Nature Communications 10, no. 1 (2019): 1-10.

Olmos, Luis E., Serdar Çolak, Sajjad Shafiei, Meead Saberi, and Marta C. González. “Macroscopic dynamics and the collapse of urban traffic.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 50 (2018): 12654-12661.

Di Clemente, Riccardo, Miguel Luengo-Oroz, Matias Travizano, Sharon Xu, Bapu Vaitla, and Marta C. González. “Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal lifestyles in urban populations.” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 1-8.

Xu, Yanyan, Serdar Çolak, Emre C. Kara, Scott J. Moura, and Marta C. González. “Planning for electric vehicle needs by coupling charging profiles with urban mobility.” Nature Energy 3, no. 6 (2018): 484-493.

Albert, Adrian, Jasleen Kaur, and Marta C. Gonzalez. “Using convolutional networks and satellite imagery to identify patterns in urban environments at a large scale.” In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp. 1357-1366. 2017

Jiang S., Yang Y., Gupta S., Veneziano D., Athavale S., and Marta C. González. “TimeGeo: A spatiotemporal framework for modeling urban mobility without surveys“, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no (37), E5370-E5378 (2016).

Toole J.L., Colak S., Sturt B., Alexandre L., Evsukoff A., and Marta C. González. “The Path Most Travelled: Travel Demand Estimation Using Big Data“, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 58, 162-177 (2015).

Toole J.L. , Herrera-Yague C., Schneider C.M., and Marta C. González. “Coupling Human Mobility and Social Ties Social Ties”, Journal of The Royal Society Interface 12(105), 20141128 (2015).

Yang Y., Herrera-Yague C., Eagle N., and Marta C. González. “Limits of Predictability in Commuting Flows in the Absence of Data for Calibration”, Scientific Reports 4, 5662 (2014).

Schneider C.M., Belik V., Couronne T., Smoreda Z., and Marta C. González. “Unravelling Daily Mobility Motifs”, Journal of The Royal Society Interface 10(84), 20130246 (2013).

Toole J.L., Cha M., and Marta C. González. “Modeling the Adoption of Innovations in the Presence of Geographic and Media Influences”, PLoS ONE 7 (1), e29528 (2012).

Simini F., Marta C. González, Maritan A., Barabasi A.-L. “A Universal Model for Mobility and Migration Patterns”, Nature 484 (7392), 96-100 (2012).

Wang P. and Gonzalez M.C., Hidalgo C.A and Barabasi A.-L., “Understanding the Spreading Patterns of Mobile Phone Viruses”, Science 324, 1071-1076 (2009).

Gonzalez M.C., Hidalgo C.A and Barabasi A.-L. “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns“, Nature 453, 479-482 (2008).

UC Berkeley
College of Environmental Design

Faculty + Staff