Luca Pappalardo (ISTI-CNR): Targeting gross polluters and grossly polluted roads to improve vehicles' emissions reduction policies

Abstract | Vehicles' emissions produce a significant share of cities' air pollution, with a substantial impact on the environment and human health. Traditional emission estimation methods use remote sensing stations, missing vehicles' full driving cycle, or focus on a few vehicles. This study uses GPS traces and a microscopic model to analyse the emissions of four air pollutants from thousands of vehicles in three European cities. We discover the existence of gross polluters, vehicles responsible for the greatest quantity of emissions, and grossly polluted roads, which suffer the greatest amount of emissions. Our simulations show that emissions reduction policies targeting gross polluters are way more effective than those limiting circulation based on a non-informed choice of vehicles. Our study applies to any city and may contribute to shaping the discussion on how to measure emissions with digital data.

Bio | He is a permanent researcher at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). He got a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. He was a researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) and the Central European University (CEU), and a visiting scholar at the Northeastern University of Boston, MA, USA. His research interests include human mobility, data privacy, network science, explainable artificial intelligence, and sports analytics. Currently, he is a member of the KDD Lab research group (https://kdd.isti.cnr.it/). He participated in numerous EU-funded projects (e.g., FP7 Datasim, H2020 Cimplex, H2020 SoBigData, H2020 Track&Know) and he is actually responsible for the research exploratories of the SoBigData++ European research infrastructure (http://project.sobigdata.eu/).