Andrea Mauri

Andrea Mauri is a Postdoctoral Researcher within the Knowledge and Intelligence Design Group at the Sustainable Design Engineering Department at the Delft University of Technology. He is also a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions and further affiliated with the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for BOLD (Big, Open, Linked Data) Cities.

When designing solutions, services, or policies to address problems of societal relevance, it is crucial to have a deep and inclusive understanding of city characteristics, citizen needs, and relations between them and the urban environment.

While traditional investigation methods such as ethnographies and interviews are standard in practice, they are expensive to conduct and may suffer from issues of representativeness and bias. The proliferation of Web platforms (e.g., social media, Web fora) and the increased affordability of sensors and IoT devices allow accessing data about a large and diverse set of users, as their activities in the digital world reflect their real-life desires, drives, and needs. This user-generated data can be of great use for city stakeholders - e.g., planners, developers, policymakers - as it can provide them with semantically rich inputs and frequent updates at a relatively cheap cost.

In this context, Andrea investigates hybrid Human-Centered AI methods that are suitable for analyzing and understanding the city. He is interested in the integration of novel artificial intelligence based approaches with the traditional ones, intending to empower city stakeholders in the development of urban solutions. In particular, he is interested in developing these methods to study the relationship between urban environment and well-being in the city of Amsterdam, with particular attention to the integration of the perspective of vulnerable, excluded, and deprived citizens in the data-driven policy-making process.