Staff Profile

After studying Computer Science, Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Campinas, Brazil, Prof Porto de Albuquerque did a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Campinas and in the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany (2006). He was awarded a prestigious fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2006-2008) to conduct post-doctoral research in social studies of information systems at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and at the Information Systems Group of the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE). He worked as Assistant Professor at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of São Paulo (2008-2010) and at the Department of Computer Systems of the Institute of Mathematical and Computing Sciences of the University of São Paulo (2010-2015), Brazil. From 2013-2016 he acted as a Visiting Professor in Geographic Information Science at the Institute of Geography of Heidelberg University, Germany with a fellowship funded by the DFG’s Excellence Programme. In 2016, João took up the post of Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick to lead the MSc in Urban Analytics and Visualisation, in which he played a pivotal role in curriculum development in partnership with Warwick's Department of Computer Science. He was also Co-Director of the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities and Warwick Director of the Centre for Urban Science and Progress London (CUSP London) in partnership with King's College London and New York University. Between January 2019 and September 2021, he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick.

He is leading a research programme centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data to improve resilience to health and environmental risks. His transdisciplinary research on socio-ecological-technical urban systems not only emphasises cross-border collaboration between the (environmental) sciences, social sciences and humanities; it also goes beyond academic disciplines to engage in co-production and participatory research with non-academic societal/indigenous stakeholders.

He has secured competitive research funds for his research in excess of £3.8m as lead investigator (£13m+ as co-investigator) from diverse national and international funding bodies (e.g. Global Challenges Research Fund, Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC, Belmont Forum, NIHR, EU H2020, FAPESP, CAPES) in collaboration with academic and non-academic partners in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the United States. Before coming to Glasgow, Prof Porto de Albuquerque worked at the University of Warwick as Co-Director of the Warwick institute for the Science of Cities, and Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, which he has established as a transdisciplinary cross-faculty hub. He has also set up the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme “TRANSFORM: Transformations of Human-Environment Interactions to Sustainable Development” aimed at training the next generation of sustainability scientists in collaboration with colleagues from different disciplines including computer science, ecology, urban geography, media studies and environmental humanities.

His research interests, which include, informal settlements, slums and deprived neighbourhood regeneration, social media analytics, participatory mapping and community data generation and, citizen science and volunteered/crowdsourced geographic information are of particular resonance to CR&DALL

 

Selected Publications: 

Camargo de Andrade, S., Porto de Albuquerque, J. , Restrepo-Estrada, C., Westerholt, R., Augusto Morales Rodriguez, C., Mario Mendiondo, E. and Cláudio Botazzo Delbem, A. (2021) The effect of intra-urban mobility flows on the spatial heterogeneity of social media activity: investigating the response to rainfall events. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, (doi: 10.1080/13658816.2021.1957898)(Early Online Publication)

Houlden, V., Porto de Albuquerque, J. , Weich, S. and Jarvis, S. (2021) Does 

nature make us happier? A spatial error model of greenspace types and mental wellbeing. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 48(4), pp. 655-670. (doi: 10.1177/2399808319887395)

Klonner, C., Hartmann, M., Dischl, R., Djami, L., Anderson, L., Raifer, M., Lima-Silva, F., Castro Degrossi, L., Zipf, A. and Porto de Albuquerque, J. (2021) The sketch map tool facilitates the assessment of OpenStreetMap data for participatory mapping. ISPRS 

International Journal of Geo-Information, 10(3), 130. (doi: 10.3390/ijgi10030130)

Herfort, B., Lautenbach, S., Porto de Albuquerque, J. , Anderson, J. and Zipf, A.(2021) The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 3037. (doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-82404-z)

Camargo de Andrade, S., Restrepo-Estrada, C., Henrique Nunes, L., Augusto Morales Rodriguez, C., Cézar Estrella, J., Cláudio Botazzo Delbem, A. and Porto de Albuquerque, J. (2021) A multicriteria 

optimization framework for the definition of the spatial granularity of urban social media analytics.International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 35(1), pp. 43-62.(doi: 10.1080/13658816.2020.1755039)

Yeboah, G. et al. (2021) Analysis of OpenStreetMap data quality at different stages of a participatory mapping process: Evidence from slums in Africa and Asia. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 10(4), 265. (doi: 10.3390/ijgi10040265)

Thomson, D. R. et al. (2020) Need for an Integrated Deprived Area “Slum” Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).Social Sciences, 9(5), 80. (doi: 10.3390/socsci9050080)