It is with great pleasure that we welcome Professor Anders Koed Madsen to DTU Management.
Anders is a professor in data, democracy, and digital cities. His research explores how digital platforms shape urban life - and how the unstructured data they generate can help us understand the human and social aspects of city dynamics. His work includes developing new data tools that make it possible to design cities from the perspective of their residents, while also supporting more social and sustainable forms of tourism.
A central part of Anders’ research is to create participatory data processes, where citizens and stakeholders take an active role in defining how data is collected, interpreted, and used. This approach offers a new way of thinking about city design - one that helps preserve the character and values of urban communities by planning with the people who live there, rather than for them.
The data Anders works with often comes from everyday sources - for example, reviews of restaurants and events, or photos shared on social media. These traces of city life are often overlooked in traditional urban planning, but they provide valuable insight into how people experience their cities.
He is currently writing a book titled Soft City Sensing, which explores how such unstructured data can be used to better understand city life and its inhabitants.
At DTU Management, Anders looks forward to advancing methods for studying the human aspects of city modelling:
“City modelling has often been based on abstract transportation models, where humans are typically reduced to agents of rational preferences. In reality, we can learn much more about the humans that the models are focused on. Today, you can just ask someone to tell a story about their city, have it transcribed automatically, and then you have data. With these new methods, we can get much better at developing models of humans that we can develop further. I am really looking forward to that.”
Anders also sees DTU as a strong platform for continuing his work at a university that plays a key role in addressing real-world challenges. He is motivated by the opportunity to make a difference in an environment that connects students and researchers around shared interests in how human ideas and data can be modelled.
Head of Division and Professor Brit Ross Winthereik also looks forward to the collaboration:
”I am incredibly pleased that Anders Koed Madsen has decided to continue his career as Professor at DTU. Anders is an internationally recognized researcher who has won multiple awards for his research on cities and city life. There is so much synergy between his research and other projects in the division, and I am very excited for Anders’ contribution to “technological forecasts” in the Observatory for Human-Centred Engineering and perspective-based language models, which can help us better understand how language models shape culture and society.”
We are excited to draw on Anders Koed Madsen’s experience to expand how DTU Management approaches data in the study of urbanization and city life.
