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1 May 2019 @ 4:00 pm

Injured by design

The design of cities has been heavily influenced by the needs of private motor vehicles, resulting in significant population and planetary health challenges. Death and injury due to motor vehicle crashes is now the world’s 5th leading cause of mortality and morbidity and motor vehicle-related air pollution accounts for 4.2 million deaths per year.

In this forum talk Dr Jason Thompson and Dr Gideon Aschwanden will detail the development of a new means of understanding urban form that uses a combination of convolutional neural networks and graph theory to better understand global city types and their relationship to motor vehicle trauma.

This forum took place on 1 May. A recording of the livestream is available below.

A recording of the Jason Thompson and Gideon Aschwanden's forum talk
A livestream of Jason Thompson and Gideon Aschwanden will be available here on 1 May

Dr Jason Thompson’s work is focused on the translation of research into practice across the areas of transportation safety, public health, post-injury rehabilitation, and health system design. Since 2014, Dr Thompson has published over 25 articles related to the investigation of injury & transport systems alongside methods machine learning and computational social science. His work has pioneered the use of agent-based models and application of convolutional neural networks in areas of traditional health system, urban design, and transportation safety research involving vulnerable road users.

Dr Thompson holds a PhD in Medicine, Masters in Clinical Psychology, and a Bachelor of Science with Honours. He is a current Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow. His DECRA project is focused on challenges associated with the introduction of Autonomous vehicles on the operation and sustainability of Australia’s $5b personal injury insurance market. In particular, how this transition will change injury rates and types, the operation of compensation and rehabilitation systems, and how these systems’ responses will shape the autonomous vehicle market, itself.

Dr. Gideon Aschwanden is Lecturer in Urban Analytics with a focus on data, learning algorithms and neural networks to evaluate the urban fabric with a focus on health, transportation and economic opportunities. He teaches graduate subjects in Urban Design and Property and leads research projects in the realm of open data, policy and transportation. Before the University of Melbourne, he taught and researched at Princeton University on digital fabrication methods and building systems as part of the CHAOS lab (cooling and heating architecturally optimized systems) in the Andlinger Centre for Energy and the Environment. He has an MSc in Architecture and a doctoral degree in Science from the ETH Zurich. To deepen his knowledge, he worked as a researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore and has professional experience in Switzerland, Singapore and the United States.