Speakers
Tom Knights - Social Impact Partnerships, Strava: Tom leads Social Impact Partnerships and Strava Metro at Strava. Through Strava Metro, Tom partners with cities, public agencies, and academic institutions to turn aggregated data from Strava's global community of more than 195 million athletes into insights that support safer streets, healthier populations, and more equitable access to active transportation and urban green space. His work spans both research and real-world application-from informing bike share and transport investment in cities around the world to supporting urban greening, walkability, and major event planning. With a background delivering infrastructure projects for public sector clients worldwide, Tom is a mapping and data enthusiast with a deep passion for the outdoors and for using evidence-led approaches to improve how communities plan and move.
Talk: From Digital Footprints to Safer Streets: How Crowdsourced Movement Data is Reshaping Active Transportation Planning
Every day, millions of people around the world record their walks, runs, and rides on Strava, generating one of the richest crowdsourced datasets on how people move actively through cities. Through Strava Metro, Strava shares this aggregated, de-identified movement data free of charge with over 3,000 public agencies, academic researchers, and transportation planners in more than 300 cities worldwide.
This talk explores how crowdsourced community data informs cycling infrastructure investment, evaluates bike share systems, improves pedestrian safety, and supports more equitable access to active transportation. It also addresses the challenges that matter most to this community: representativeness, bias, public trust, and what responsible industry–research data partnerships look like in practice. Drawing on real-world case studies from cities on multiple continents, Tom will make the case for crowdsourced digital footprints as a critical and complementary layer in evidence-led transport planning.
Mark Green - Professor of Health Geography, University of Liverpool: Mark is Professor of Health Geography at the University of Liverpool. Their research examines how new forms of (big) data (e.g., images, text, loyalty card records) can supplement traditional administrative datasets (e.g., surveys, electronic health records) for understanding the social and spatial drivers of health inequalities.
Talk: What can digital footprints data tell us about the impacts of outdoor unhealthy food advertisements?
The regulation of unhealthy food marketing is central to the UK Government’s strategy to reduce obesity and improve population health. Much of the existing evidence base focuses on traditional and established media channels (e.g., TV, online), with less research on the impacts of outdoor advertising. In recent years, several UK Local Authorities have introduced restrictions on unhealthy food advertising in public spaces. Yet evaluating these policies is challenging due to the absence of open datasets capturing what is advertised, where, and when. This talk will showcase one approach to addressing the data gap through utilising street view imagery and AI methods to extract outdoor advertisements and classify what is being advertised on them. Drawing on longitudinal data from Liverpool since 2020, the talk will: (i) examine which communities are most exposed to unhealthy food advertising, and (ii) assess the impact of exposure to unhealthy food advertising on food consumption.
Vahé Nafilyan OBE - Health Statistician at the Office for National Statistics: Vahé is a statistician and leads the Analysis Unit within the National Statistician’s Office. He previously headed up the Health Division at the Office for National Statistics. He has extensive experience of using linked administrative records to produce innovative analyses on important public health issues. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he used newly linked data to lead various analyses on inequalities in COVID-19 mortality and vaccination. Following the pandemic, he led the development a programme of work investigating the labour market effects of health interventions. He joined ONS in 2017 and holds a PhD in Economics from King’s College London
Talk: New linked data to understand the effect of health on labour market outcomes
Fran Pontin - Senior Research Fellow in the School of Law and Lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds:
Fran is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Law and Lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on ethical, reproducible approaches to spatial data science, integrating open and smart data to address societal challenges such as food insecurity, gender inequality, and physical activity, with a particular emphasis on health-related behaviours. Fran co-leads the Safer Parks Dashboard project, which combines spatial data and lived experiences to inform safer, more inclusive park design.
Talk: Safer Parks by Design: Leveraging Open Data as a Foundation for Intersectional Digital Footprints data in Gender-Sensitive Urban Planning
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) and the fear it generates restricts access to parks, vital for health, social connection, and active travel. In Britain, one in six women feel unsafe in parks during the day, rising to four in five after dark. Current safety assessments rely on resource-intensive audits. This project addresses that gap through the Safer Parks Dashboard, an open-access platform capturing women’s and intersectional lived experiences with open spatial data and innovative gender-sensitive spatial syntax measures. The dashboard is co-designed with key actors in the parks and VWAG space to support decision-making around increasing park safety for women and girls across park design, management, and policing. Digital footprints data (e.g. wareables and footfall data) present the opportunity to better understand human behaviour in parks and greenspace, such as the impact of daylight on park usage across intersectional identities. This talk presents a framework for building upon openly available data with the use of digital footprint data and calls for more intersectional smart data.
Heather Wardle - Professor of Gambling Research and Policy, University of Glasgow: Heather is a Professor of Gambling Research and Policy at the University of Glasgow. A survey specialist, she co-leads the Gambling Survey for Great Britain and is interested in how to fuse digital data with survey data to maximise insight in ethically robust ways. She is co-investigator of the Smart Data Donation Service.
Talk: Risky relationships? Exploring the intersection of ethics and AI within the commercial gambling sector
The transformation of the commercial gambling sector into a primarily digital product has created opportunities for both operators and regulators to consider how to harness consumers’ digital footprints for their respective purposes. This talk charts the development and growth of behavioural algorithms based on individuals’ data designed to detect gambling-related harms, the use of consumer data for product and marketing personalisation, and the potential implementation of AI within consumer services products. It explores the ethical issues associated with integrating AI into a sector that carries health-related risks. The discussion will reflect on current and future regulatory practices, the role of research and researchers within these systems, and the existing kinds of framing and language systems used to examine the risks and benefits of these developments.