King's College London

The main focus of my research over the past five years has been the mining of telecommunications and transportation data sets to provide insight into human socio-economic behaviour at the urban, regional, and national scales. The breadth and depth of these data sets has enabled me to pursue a wide range of interests including: firm internationalisation and location choice, social network analysis, disruption effects in public transit and airline systems, and constraints on access to opportunity in London.

Looking forward, I hope to begin bringing in some historical perspective: working to produce a book that looks back at nearly 120 years of location theory; exploring the historical growth of Britain's telecommunications system; and examining the connection between telecommunications/ICT usage and London's innovative small firms. The other area of interest is in quantification: improving our understanding and prediction of how disruptions produced by weather, crowding, or security issues produce knock-on effects on nearby stations through the integration of usage data and better modelling of route choice by transit users; and looking for ways to measure the relationships embodied in the social networks of businesses.

I joined the department as Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography at the start of 2013. Previously, I had been a Research Associate for two years at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis following the completion of his MPhil/PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning. He also holds a B.A. (1997) in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.

In the intervening years, Jon worked for a database mining and marketing start-up based in New York and London in a range of capacities: graphic designer, web application developer, and project manager. This work stimulated his interest in 'big data' and its potential as a platform for examining and acting upon 'smart cities'. In his research, Jon has collaborated with public and private sector organisations such as Transport for London, Telecom Italia, AT&T, British Telecom, and IBM's Smarter Cities lab near Dublin.

Tying these collaborations and research interests together is a long-standing interest in the impact that communications technologies are having on our society and economy: on access to opportunity and mobility; on firm location, clustering, and growth; and on our understanding of human interaction on a vast scale.

I blog periodically on these issues at reades.com and tweet under @jreades.