
Smit Thakkar is a PhD student in transportation engineering at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He completed his Masters in Transportation Engineering and Planning from National Institute of Technology, Surat, India, and Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering from Charusat University, India. He received a QUT scholarship for the years 2019 to 2022 to pursue his PhD. The objective of his dissertation is to propose a comprehensive framework to understand and quantify network-wide traffic dynamics using real traffic data. It involves finding latent traffic patterns, estimating network-wide traffic states, and understanding the cause and extent of traffic congestion by leveraging the crucial spatial and temporal interactions in traffic dynamics. He was also awarded a scholarship by Ministry of Human Resource Development (Department of Science and Technology, Government of India) to pursue his Masters in India. Before starting his doctoral studies at QUT, he was a research assistant at the National Institute of Technology, Surat. His work mostly involved Big Data analytics using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi sensor data as complementary transport data, large-scale traffic modelling and Simulation, Data fusion. He has used various tools like R Programming, Python and MS Access Queries to perform big data analytics on various forms of relational data. He has also used various spatial visualization tools like ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, CARTO Builder and Tableau. His research interest includes Network-wide traffic modelling, Macroscopic traffic analysis, Traffic data mining, Predictive analytics, Traffic Data Fusion, Smart data collection techniques, and Data Visualization.