Data Science for Future-Proof Transport Planning. Inaugural Lecture by Professor Robin Lovelace. 16:00 16:25 Drinks reception in ITS social space 16:30 17:30 Lecture at Esther Simpson room 1.01 17:00 - 1800 - Back to ITS social space for refreshment We are delighted to announce that Professor Robin Lovelace from The Institute for Transport Studies will be giving his Inaugural Lecture at The University of Leeds. We would like to welcome everyone be they colleagues, postgraduate researchers, students, alumni, or visitors to this lecture celebrating the achievement and research contributions of Professor Lovelace. In this inaugural lecture, we will hear from Professor Robin Lovelace, a leading expert in transport data science, as he discusses his work developing the evidence needed for more effective and future-proof transport planning. The lecture will explore the role of data science in transport planning, highlighting key methodological, empirical and applied contributions made by Robin and his colleagues at the University of Leeds and beyond. He will share insights from his journey as a researcher and practitioner, ranging from his PhD on the energy costs of commuting to recent work with multi-disciplinary teams to develop web applications for national government agencies. Robin will cover key milestones in his career, including: How he became the lead developer of the national Propensity to Cycle Tool (publicly available at www.pct.bike/) as an early-career researcher A secondment to the data science team in Number 10 Downing Street [https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-society-politics/news/article/4961/leeds-academic-awarded-first-10-downing-street-data-science-fellowship] His role building data and digital capacity (including instigating the project that led to the development of the plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk [http://plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk]/ active travel infrastructure design portal) in government as part of the new government agency Active Travel England where Robin worked in 2023 and 2024, during which he balanced his time between the University of Leeds and the Civil Service (and a growing family [https://www.robinlovelace.net/post/2024-retrospective/]). Current projects in 2025: research into integrated active/public transport scenarios and bike buses in Portugal (see biclar.tmlmobilidade.pt/index/ [https://biclar.tmlmobilidade.pt/index/] for publicly available results) and developing and the ongoing Network Planning Tool for Scotland, with live demonstrations of new features. Robins approach emphasises reproducible, open and therefore verifiable and scientific research techniques. He has a strong interest in open source software development and international community-building to maximize impact, leading him to publish several popular R packages and to co-author books. These include Geocomputation with R, publicly available at r.geocompx.org (Lovelace et al. 2025), and Geocomputation with Python, publicly available at py.geocompx.org (Dorman et al., 2025), part of the geocompx.org website and online community which he co-founded. Aligning with this hands-on approach to accessible data science and his learning by doing teaching philosophy, the inaugural lecture will be preceded by a Hackathon event earlier in the day in ITS room 1.11, so keep an eye out on further comms as spaces for that will be limited.