Last week I attended the Mobile Tartu conference 2024. It was the 9^th^ time that this 2-yearly conference has run, marking 16 years since the first Mobile Tartu in 2008. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my time, but this one was exceptionally good, containing ingredients for a productive, professional, inclusive and fun event (take note anyone thinking of organising a conference or workshop, including my future self)! I had a great time and learned loads during many of the sessions, and during the social and down-time in the city of Tartu.

This write-up provides an overview of the event and links to some of the impressive research projects presented. The conference took place over 4 days, 5 including the excursion day on Saturday. (I mis most of ‘day 5’ on the long journey home during which I wrote much of this blog post). The location was — you guessed it from the name — the Estonian town of Tartu, which is how I (and I suspect many others working in the mobility/transport sector) first heard of it.

In summery, I really enjoyed the conference! I would highly recommend it to anyone working in the field of mobility and transport research. It had the highest quality of research focussed on origin-destination data and the use of mobile phone data for transport research that I have ever seen. I wonder: if there conference had a different name, e.g. the “Origin-destination and mobility data research conference”, would it attract more people? Maybe, but the name should remain, Tartu is a fantastic place, and the strong links between the conference and the city are a big part of its appeal.

Tuesday 11th June

Tuesday was the first day of the 2-day PhD School that preceded and then joined the main conference. Traditionally it takes place outside the main conference location and this year was no exception: a nature reserve just outside Tartu was the location chosen this year. There were fun ice-breakers, including a decentralised quiz during which participants were tasked with finding at least one person who met each of a dozen criteria relating to topics including people’s favourite GUI-based GIS software (QGIS of course!), … and Estonian puddings (the hardest criteria because it had to be a non-Estonian who had eaten and remembered the name of said hard-to-pronounce pudding).

Even more inclusive was how everyone introduced themselves. We were asked to stand in a circle looking in and say our name, where we’re from and how many ‘Mobile Tartus’ we had previously attended (number one for me, I was impressed to learn that there were people there who had all 9). After some refreshments and general mingling it was time for the first keynote talk: Kristjan … who had spent time on a placement with the Estonian government. His talk was fascinating to me, as someone who had made the shift from academia to the public sector. Instead of working on separate jobs — as I did when I shifted from being on secondment to Active Travel England as part of the 10DS Fellowship to taking on a second job in early 2023 — Kristjan seems to have gone all-in on the public sector job, and acheived a huge amount. As far as I am aware, in Estonia (as in many other countries including Germany and perhaps all the nordic nations), being an academic means being a civil servant, that is to say: like civil servants, academics in Estonia are employed by the government.

I’m not sure about the distribution of pros and cons of this, but I imagine that it makes it easier for academics to take on government roles (has anyone done research into the extent to which government policies are evidence-based in countries in which academic staff in state universities are civil servants, compared with countries in which they are not, I wonder). The talk was fascinating, covering projects that had involved new and emerging datasets held by the Estonian government.

I already knew that Estonia was an early adopter of ‘digital government’ but didn’t realise the breadth and depth of digital government initiatives and policies it has in place (in fact ‘initiatives and policies’ don’t really do justice to some of these things, digital government seems to have become so embedded that it’s simply how things are done). Digital government in Estonia includes (or perhaps more accurately is underpinned by) X-Road, an open source system for secure, decentralised management of multiple government datasets that serves hundreds of thousands of queries every year, saving thousands of person-days worth of work. The system allows different parts of government to inter-connect, helping with the process of what the Department for Transport’s Chief Scientific Advisor calls de-siloisation. I took some notes during the talk, one of which was the following:

If you never scale, you’ll never have an impact on policy: as Kristjan said it’s not enough to put the concept out, write the paper and move on: you need a prototype.

After the talk (which had many other examples of digital government and its clear benefits), we split into four groups for the PhD workshop sessions:

• A team working on datasets representing refugee movements
• A group working on Mobility Hubs
• A team working on data from Helsinki provided by Hennriki Tenkannen, who led the session

Despite not being a PhD student and therefore not having signed-up to a session, I decided to attend Hennriki’s session, wanting to brush-up on my Python skills and to check-out some open access transport-related datasets from Finland.

The final part of day 1 was a social which involved optionally going into a sauna and (even more optionally) taking a dip in the river. Tired from all the activity of the first day we headed to Tartu where the rest of the conference would take place.

Wednesday 12th June

The second day involved a continuation of the PhD workshops, plus the opening of main Mobile Conference for all participants. There was plenty of time to work on the topics and other things: I decided to work on a related dataset and the nascent {spanishoddata} package during some of this time, thanks to an overdue meeting with Egor Kotov from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Update from January 2025: the package is now published on CRAN, and the source code is hosted on GitHub at github.com/rOpenSpain/spanishoddata.

Thursday 13th June

The first full day of the conference involved keynote talks by Nico Van de Weghe from Ghent University and Anu Masso, interspersed with regular talks submitted by participants.

Nico’s talk was on the topic of “Exploring Possibilities: generative AI in human mobility research”, and can be seen in the video below:

Anu’s talk was on the topic of “Mobility Data Justice: Estonian Data Manifesto”, and can be seen in the video below:

Friday 14th June

This was the final day of the academic part of the conference and a big one for me, as it was the day of my talk. As shown in the video below, my talk was titled “Reproducible research and open tools for future-proof transport planning”. See more about the talk here and see the open source code at futureproof.robinlovelace.net.

As with the previous day, there were two paper sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The topics were

• Morning session
  • Session 4A: Accessibility to public transit and shared mobility
  • Session 4B: Daily use of urban space: understanding mobility and segregation with mobile big data
• Afternoon session
  • Session 5A: The spatial, digital, and temporal dimensions in mobility and urbanity

The panel discussion, which I had the honour of being involved in, was on the topic of “Understanding accessibility and socio-spatial disparities with mobile big data”, and highlighted the importance of open data and reproducible research to ensure that the benefits of new data sources are shared widely and equitably. It was refreshing to have the involvement of people not only in academia but also from the public sector and industry, including Kertu Vuks from the Tartu City Government, in the session.

Conclusion

Mobile Tartu 2024 was a fantastic conference, one of the most enjoyable and productive I have ever attended. It was an honour to present and I thank the organisers for the opportunity.

I look forward to the next Mobile Tartu conference in 2026, and hope to see many of the same faces there.