Debraj De

dblp:57/3695 · DBLP profile ↗
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7ranked-venue papers in the field
2as first author
7since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-3363-0020ORCID · corroborated

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Database Systems & Data Management · 7 (2 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 "One Table to Rule Them All": How a Single Table can Enable Extensive Insights, Analytics and Assessment on Human Mobility Data
Debraj De, Kevin A. Sparks, Elizabeth C. McBride, Annetta Burger, James D. Gaboardi, Jesse McGaha, Chance Brown, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, Carter Christopher, Gautam Malviya Thakur
MDM1
2025 GRUMDN: A Multi-Task Model for Predicting Human Patterns-of-Life from Stay Transition Data
abstract
Understanding human patterns-of-life (PoL) is essential towards ensuring safe and secure indoor facility environment as well as outdoor urban environment. Prediction of human movement in between places of interest is vital in understanding human PoL. Movement between spaces maybe represented and detected in one of the two forms: 1) trajectories: locations measured at regular time intervals by mobile sensors, bluetooth or GPS sensors; or 2) stay transitions: semantic PoI (points of interest) and stay duration data measurable by eventbased sensors that collect data when a check-in or check-out event is detected. Stay transition data provides a more compressed data format compared to trajectories data, especially in situations with longer stay durations, while preserving the information necessary for PoL analysis. Now as introduced briefly in the paper, our deployed end application (Digital Twin of a facility with non-player characters, besides the interactive user in virtual reality) needed a well-performing and validated AI/ML model for simulating high quality stay transitions behavior. In this study we thus primarily present our findings with developing and validating that model, which is a multi-task neural network for stay transition prediction. The neural network consists of two heads, for corresponding two tasks of stay category prediction and stay duration prediction. We evaluated gated recurrent units and multi-layer perceptrons of varying network sizes for stay category prediction; while mixture density networks, noisy generator-only networks, and generative adversarial networks of varying network sizes for stay duration prediction. We have then evaluated four multi-task models, constructed by combining these specialized models, on their ability to predict stay transition data. We tested our models on datasets from two different cases: 1) a simulation-generated dataset of indoor movement within the HFIR (high flux isotope reactor) nuclear reactor facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); and 2) the GeoLife human mobility dataset of outdoor urban movement available in literature. Our results indicate that GRUMDN, which combines gated recurrent units (GRU) for stay category prediction task, and mixture density networks (MDN) for stay duration prediction task, did overall outperform other multitask models and the current state-of-the-art.
Chathika Gunaratne, Debraj De, Mason Stott, Gautam Malviya Thakur
MDM2
2025 Using Temporal Information from Human Mobility Data to Detect Anchor Points
abstract
Spatiotemporal mobility data are available in massive quantities, but large quantities of data typically include fewer variables or data fields. Often, the only available fields are User ID, Longitude, Latitude, Timestamp ($U L L T$). This raises an important question: how much can we infer about human mobility patterns using only these four fields? With$U L L T$data, we do not know individuals' socioeconomic status information or when they are visiting their anchor points (AP) or locations (such as homes, places of employment, or schools), and it is a modern challenge to use this data to infer these characteristics. When detecting anchor locations with limited input information, verification and validation ($\mathrm{V} \quad \mathrm{V}$) are significant challenges. This paper addresses the problem of identifying individuals' anchor locations using only temporal information from spatiotemporal datasets with limited attributes. Our approach does not explicitly use latitude and longitude during analysis. Locationbased information is only employed in the preprocessing stage to identify periods of movement (trips) and stops (dwelling). Beyond this step, all analysis is based on temporal patterns. In theory, if stops and dwell times could be detected through alternative means, our method could function entirely without location-based input. We demonstrate this methodology on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data, because it includes a carefully designed and collected time use survey with representative sampling and labeled ground truth. The high-quality survey data allows us to test the accuracy of our methods because NHTS contains intended place labels and agent/user characteristics. We have also applied our validated AP identification algorithm on very large-scale GPS based trajectory data for Patterns-of-Life (PoL) assessment and other applications, but due to space limit that could not be presented here.
Elizabeth C. McBride, James D. Gaboardi, Chance Brown, Kevin A. Sparks, Debraj De, Annetta Burger, Jesse McGaha, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Carter Christopher
MDM5
2024 HumoNet: A Framework for Realistic Modeling and Simulation of Human Mobility Network
abstract
Understanding, analyzing, and predicting human mobility and dynamics are valuable to solving pressing problems, developing effective plans, and prescribing timely remedies. As a computational approach, realistic human mobility simulations allow us to understand, analyze, and predict complex systems, including human societies. Accurate simulations rely on (1) the model that captures interactions and behaviors of myriad entities in our society and (2) the mapping of model instances to real-world entities. Taking this into account, this paper introduces the Human Mobility Network simulation framework (HumoNet), an integrated patterns of life (POL) simulation framework that leverages real-world data layers including transportation networks, points of interest, populations, popularity, and human trajectories. HumoNet is a data informed model in which agents are equipped with activities, locomotion, and planning capabilities. To simulate realistic kinematic maneuvers of individuals in transportation networks, HumoNet harnesses a microscopic traffic simulator that provides interaction among vehicles and traffic objects. In this paper, we describe the framework, outline our methodologies, and discuss the data processing and challenges of each data layer. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our simulations capture key features of human mobility by comparing them to the literature and real data using standard measures of human mobility (i.e., the radius of gyration, number of locations visited, level of exploration) and metrics scoring (i.e., Jensen-Shannon divergence). We envision that the synthetic data produced by HumoNet will serve as a benchmark for analyzing epidemics, deploying EV charging networks, and validating AI/ML tasks such as location prediction.
Joon-Seok Kim 0001, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Licia Amichi, Annetta Burger, Chathika Gunaratne, Joseph V. Tuccillo, Taylor Hauser, Joseph Bentley, Kevin A. Sparks, Debraj De, Chance Brown, Elizabeth C. McBride, Jesse McGaha, James D. Gaboardi, Xiuling Nie, Carter Christopher
MDM10
2024 DICER: Data Intensive Computing Environment and Runtime for Evaluating Unprecedented Scale of Geospatial-Temporal Human Mobility Data
abstract
With the significant increase in sources and volume of human mobility data through commercial data vendors as well as microsimulation of cities, the scale of geospatial-temporal data to analyze and assess for mobility characterization has grown to the level of Big Data. There are mobility related commercial organizations deploying scalable computing, but often the system architecture, workflow, and intermediate processing components are not fully disclosed in relevant scope. Current research literature has a notable lack of studies demonstrating architectures and workflows for human mobility analytics that are implemented on a TeraByte scale of geospatial-temporal data. In this context, this paper presents a hyperscale-level system solution named DICER (Data Intensive Computing Environment and Runtime) for processing and analytics of geospatial-temporal data at big data scale. Although the cluster computing architecture of DICER with Apache Spark job running on Kubernetes cluster is not new, there are innovations in the workflow, hierarchical processing logic, and a wide range of intermediate preprocessing and mobility metrics calculation. We have performed case studies to validate the effectiveness of DICER system solution by performing detailed analytics and assessment of human mobility microsimulation output at three different scopes and scale, including a usecase with 16.97 TeraByte and 259.2 Billion rows of data. In addition, we have presented another case study of utilizing DICER to perform the same mobility processing and comparative analytics on large-scale commercially available geospatial-temporal data. All these case studies validate the efficiency and usefulness of DICER in computing population mobility characteristics from geospatial-temporal trajectory data at an unprecedented scale (not only just data volume, but also combination of: number of user entities, temporal frequency, spatial resolution, data duration).
Debraj De, Gautam Malviya Thakur, Jesse McGaha, Chance Brown, Xiuling Nie, Todd Thomas, James D. Gaboardi, Kevin A. Sparks, Annetta Burger, Elizabeth C. McBride, Joon-Seok Kim 0001, Licia Amichi, Chathika Gunaratne, Carter Christopher, Dan Zubko
MDM1
2024 MetaPoL: Immersive VR based Indoor Patterns of Life (PoL) and Anomalies Data Generation for Insider Threat Modeling in Nuclear Security
abstract
Insider threats are perhaps the most serious challenges that nuclear and radiological security systems face. Insiders pose such a great threat due to their access, authority, and knowledge, granting them opportunities to bypass dedicated nuclear and radiological security elements. For example, in one of the latest major insider threat incidents to nuclear security, the Doel-4 nuclear powerplant in Belgium suffered a shutdown, the threat of nuclear materials diversion, and long-term loss of tens of millions of dollars. Seven years of investigation concluded that it was an inside job and attempted sabotage. In this regard, there is an immediate need for R&D and technology integration in the domain of modeling indoor Patterns-of-Life (PoL) and anomaly detection. This can be achieved by using datasets of facility users’ mobility and activity, which can support the design of algorithms for insider threat modeling and detection. However, due to classification, privacy, sensitivity, and safety protocols, such datasets from real physical nuclear reactor facilities are not only hard to share, but also not always feasible to deploy and collect. Aiming to find an alternate solution, our proposed demonstration work - MetaPoL, is the first-ever (for the application space) immersive VR (virtual reality) environment of a real-world secure facility and allows users to move-and-stay through the designed indoor physical layout and also encounter NPCs (non-player characters) that emulate other facility users. In the MetaPoL an interactive user performs realistic spatio-temporal movement, dwelling and activities using a Meta Quest Pro VR headset, and that generates high-frequency (in time) high-resolution (in space) indoor spatial-temporal datasets that are valuable for PoL modeling and anomaly detection research specifically for insider threat modeling and detection mission. Such generated realistic, rich in context, and mission specific datasets can boost AI/Machine Learning based research for modeling and detecting insider threats in nuclear security and nonproliferation.
Chathika Gunaratne, Mason Stott, Debraj De, Gautam Malviya Thakur
MDM3
2021 Accelerated Assessment of Critical Infrastructure in Aiding Recovery Efforts During Natural and Human-made Disaster
abstract
Relief and recovery from disasters (both natural and human-made) require a coordinated approach across several federal and state government agencies. In order to achieve optimal resource allocation and deployment of first responders, accurate and timely assessment of the impact and extent of destruction are the cornerstones to any recovery effort. Ideally, this knowledge should be gathered and shared within the first 0-24 hours (termed as "Acute Phase" by the U.S. CDC guideline) for informed decision-making. But achieving this poses significant challenges for the data collection and data harmonization processes, particularly when voluminous data are being generated from diverse and distributed sources during the disaster responses. To this end, this work developed a scalable and efficient workflow to dynamically collect and harmonize crowd-sourced geographic multi-modal data, and then assess critical infrastructure (CI) damaged during disaster events. We demonstrate the application of our framework with two real-world experiences in addressing post-disaster recovery efforts - for the Bahamas (Natural - due to Hurricane Dorian, 2019) and Beirut (Human-made - due to explosion caused by the ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse, 2020). We have illustrated that a coordinated effort is needed for planning as well as for execution to achieve informed decision making.
Gautam S. Thakur, Kelly M. Sims, Chantelle Rittmaier, Joseph Bentley, Debraj De, Junchuan Fan, Tao Liu 0020, Rachel Palumbo, Jesse McGaha, Phil Nugent, Bryan Eaton, Jordan Burdette, Tyler Sheldon, Kevin A. Sparks
SIGSPATIAL/GIS5