Carlo Ratti

Research Statement

AI generated · Oct 28, 2026

Carlo Ratti's indexed work centers on using cell-phone location data for urban analysis, a line of inquiry opened by his first-author "Mobile Landscapes" study (865 citations) and extended through real-time urban monitoring with mobile-phone traces in Rome. As senior author, he helped establish geo-located Twitter as a proxy for global mobility patterns and origin-destination flow estimation from mobile phone data, while "Measuring human perceptions of a large-scale urban region using machine learning" (808 citations) applies similar sensing logic to how people experience city space. Earlier first-author work on energy consumption and urban texture and on space-syntax inconsistencies rounds out a sustained interest in how spatial form and human movement interact. Beyond that core, Ratti appears as a middle author on LIO-SAM and LVI-SAM, tightly-coupled lidar-inertial and lidar-visual-inertial odometry systems for robot mapping, and on low-cost sensors for outdoor air pollution monitoring from an end-user perspective. No software tools, datasets, patents, or funded grants are indexed beyond these publications. Read together, the listed outputs trace a consistent arc: from quantifying urban form and energy use, through mobility measurement at city and global scales, to perception modeling and robotic sensing—each anchored in empirical data rather than theory alone.

Most Cited Works

Urban planning in the era of large language models

Yu Zheng, Fengli Xu, Yuming Lin, Paolo Santi, Carlo Ratti, Qi R Wang, Yong Li

Nature Computational Science2025

44Citations

Key Themes, Trends, and Drivers of Mobile Ambient Air Quality Monitoring: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

An Wang, Sanjana Paul, Priyanka deSouza, Yuki Machida, Simone Mora, Fábio Duarte, Carlo Ratti

Environmental Science & Technology

Research Areas

Human Mobility and Location-Based AnalysUrban Design and Spatial AnalysisSmart Cities and TechnologiesTransportation Planning and OptimizationUrban Transport and Accessibility

Affiliations & Education

Employment

2025–present· now
Politecnico di Milano(IT)
Professor · ABC
2003–2026
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(US)

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Sources