Every time someone swipes a loyalty card, taps a smart meter, or scans a train ticket, they leave a digital trace of their daily life. This project will develop new ways for social scientists to analyse those traces—not just to understand behaviour, but to help plan better public services. The problem is that traditional research methods, like surveys or travel diaries, capture only snapshots. They miss the messy reality of a day: dropping kids at school, commuting, gym, coffee, shopping, then home. New sources of data—from retailers, energy companies, and transport operators—can reveal these patterns in real time, but researchers lack the tools to use them ethically and effectively. If this research succeeds, it will give governments and businesses a clearer picture of how people actually move, shop, and consume energy. That could mean more efficient road networks, better-placed housing, or goods and services designed to reduce environmental impact. The project will also train a new generation of researchers in the responsible use of consumer data, ensuring privacy and personal rights remain central to any analysis.
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Describe the proposed research in simple terms in a way that could be publicised to a general audience (up to 4000 chars) Social science is concerned with understanding human behaviour patterns. These patterns are increasingly revealed through data which are captured by retailers and other commercial organisations. Example sources of these data include store loyalty cards, smart energy meters, mobile telephone logs, vehicle registrations and smart tickets for trains and buses. The data are not just interesting to academics, they can provide important insights for delivering health care, building houses or roads, and producing sustainable goods and services with reduced environmental impact. This project seeks to develop new approaches to social science research which are needed to exploit new sources of consumer data. The ethical use of data for the public good and protecting the privacy, confidentiality and personal rights of individual consumers is of paramount importance. This research is different for a number of reasons, for example, because activities can be examined continuously and in real time. In the past, a social scientist might have studied 'typical' commuting flows from a residence to a workplace. Now it is much easier to look at multi-purpose activities or trip-chaining in a single day e.g. delivering children to school, going to work, visiting the gym, having a coffee and doing the shopping before returning home. It requires new methods from artificial intelligence and data science which the project will help to develop. These methods are recognised by governments and business as crucial to future well-being and economic prosperity because data are now so widespread and their content is so revealing. The outcomes from the project will include novel publications appearing in the scientific literature, but the research will also help businesses and government to plan more effectively, and it will train the next generation of students and research professionals in the applications and analysis of new and emerging forms of data.
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