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Zachary Patterson, PhD

Professor, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering


Zachary Patterson, PhD

Zachary received his PhD from McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne in Switzerland in the Transport and Mobility Laboratory (TRANSP-OR). He was Assistant and Associate Professor starting in 2010 in the Concordia University department of Geography, Planning & Environment. In 2021 he joined the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE). Professionally he worked as transportation modeler at the Montreal regional public transportation planner, l'Agence metropolitaine de transport. Zachary's research focuses on: the use of emerging technologies in transport-related data collection, computational geospatial data processing, data analysis and inference with statistical and artificial intelligence techniques, and discrete choice experiments.


Teaching activities

Advanced Quantitative Methods

Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with the R programming environment at least for the conducting of statistical analysis, and hopefully also for data manipulation and preparation. They will become familiar with the kinds of statistical analysis that is typically used in the fields of geography, planning and environmental studies. They will also work towards understanding the type of statistical analysis that is likely to be done as part of their master’s thesis. Ideally, as part of the term project, the student will be able to work with the same data set they expect to use in the analysis for their thesis. Alternatively, another data set that resembles the data they expect to use for their thesis will be used.

It is open to graduate students. Download most recent course outline  here.

Analyzing Choice

Over the course of this class, students learn to design, implement and analyse the data, from a stated choice survey. The topic of the survey will have to do with an important environmental question. It is open to undergraduate and undergraduate students. Download the most recent undergraduate course outline here.


Transportation GIS

Download the latest course outline. This course introduces students to the transportation planning and modeling process aided by the use of a GIS-based transportation decision aid tool. A real-world case-study region and transportation system is used to illustrate the different elements of the planning and modeling process. The course aims to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses (particularly with regards to how it treats the interaction between the transportation system and land-use) of the traditional transportation planning approach.


Selected publications

Refereed publications

*Co-authors I’ve supervised.

Sneha Paul, Zachary Patterson & Nizar Bouguila. (2023). DualMLP: A Two-stream Fusion Model for 3D Point Cloud Classification. The Visual Computer Journal. (Accepted for publication.)

Asiye Baghbani, Saeed Rahmani, Nizar Bouguila and Zachary Patterson. (2023). Predicting Passenger Flow Using Graph Neural Networks with Scheduled Sampling on Bus Networks. 2023 IEEE 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), Bilbao, Spain. (Accepted for publication.)

Mohamed Chaaben, Asiye Baghbani, Nizar Bouguila and Zachary Patterson. (2023). Multi-STGAC: A Graph Attention Based Model for Short-term Bus Passenger Flow Forecasting. 2023 IEEE 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), Bilbao, Spain. (Accepted for publication.)

Bobin Wang, E.O.D. Xun Ji, Hamed Naseri, Alex L. Loiselle, Ricardo A. Daziano, Zachary Patterson, and Matthew Feinberg. (2023). How to Effectively Communicate about Greenhouse Gas Emissions with Different Populations. Environmental Science & Policy, 147, September, pp. 29-43.

Saeed Rahmani,* Asiye Baghbani,* Nizar Bouguila and Zachary Patterson. Graph Neural Networks for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Survey, IEEE Transactions ITS, 2022. Accepted for publication.

Ben Azoulay* and Zachary Patterson. Towards the Standardization of Reporting in Smartphone Travel Surveys: The Development and Application of the Smartphone Survey Reporting Guidelines (SSRGs). Transportation Research Procedia for the 12th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods.

Zachary Patterson, Aaron Bensmihen,* and Gavin Hermanson.* The Multimodal Accessibility Target (MAT). Transportation Research Record, accepted for publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981231172503

Bochu Liu, Michael J. Widener, Lindsey G. Smith, Steven Farber, Dionne Gesink, Leia M. Minaker, Zachary Patterson, Kristian Larsen, and Jason Gilliland. Time-geographic project of household food provision: Conceptualization and a pilot case study. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Asiye Baghbani,* Nizar Bouguila, and Zachary Patterson. Short-term passenger flow prediction using a bus network graph convolutional LSTM neural network model. Transportation Research Record, 2022.

Godwin Badu-Marfo,* Bilal Farooq, and Zachary Patterson. Composite travel generative adversarial networks for tabular and sequential population synthesis. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, pages 1–10, 2022.

Long Pan,* E.O.D. Waygood, and Zachary Patterson. Would you wait? bus choice behavior analysis considering various incentives. Transportation Research Record, 2676(7), 2022.

Hamed Naseri,* E.O.D. Waygood, Bobin Wang,* Zachary Patterson, and Ricardo Daziano. A novel feature selection technique to better predict climate change stage of change. Sustainability, 14(40), 2022.

Pierre Laffont,* E.O.D. Waygood, and Zachary Patterson. How many electric vehicles are needed to reach co2 emissions goals? a case study from montreal, canada. Sustainability, 14(3), 2022.

Ravi Teja Vemuri,* Muhammad Azam,* Nizar Bouguila, and Zachary Patterson. A bayesian sampling framework for asymmetric generalized Gaussian mixture models learning. Neural Computing and Applications, 34:14123 –14134, 2022.

E.O.D. Waygood, Bobin Wang,* Ricardo Daziano, Zachary Patterson, and Markéta Braun
Kohlová. The climate change stage of change measure: Vehicle choice experiment. Journal of
Environmental Planning and Management, 65:1210–1239, 2022.

Ricardo Daziano Zachary Patterson Bobin Wang*, E.O.D. Waygood and Matthew Feinberg. Does hedonic framing improve people's willingness-to-pay for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions? Accepted in Transportation Research Part D, 2021.

E.O.D. Waygood, Bobin Wang,* Ricardo Daziano, Zachary Patterson, and Marketa Braun Kohlova. The climate change stage of change measure: Vehicle choice experiment. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2021.

Lindsey Smith, Michael Widener, Bochu Liu, Steven Farber, Leia Minaker, Zachary Patterson, Kristian Larsen and Jason Gilliland. Comparing household and individual measures of access through a food environment lens: what household food opportunities are missed when measuring access to food retail at the individual level? Accepted for publication in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021.

Ricardo Daziano, Owen Waygood, Zachary Patterson, Matthew Feinberg and Bobin Wang. Reframing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Information Presentation on the Environmental Protection Agency’s New-Vehicle Labels to Increase Willingness to Pay. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2020, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123669.

Ali Yazdizadeh*, Zachary Patterson, and Bilal Farooq.Ensemble convolutional neural networks for mode inference in smartphone travel survey.IEEE Transactions on IntelligentTransportation Systems, 2019.

Zachary Patterson, Kyle Fitzsimmons*, Takeshi Mukai, and Stewart Jackson. Itinerum: Theopen smartphone travel survey platform. SoftwareX, 10, July-December 2019.

Godwin Badu-Marfo*, Bilal Farooq, and Zachary Patterson. Perturbation privacy for sensitivelocations in mobility data publication: A case study of montreal trajet surveys. Washington,DC, 2019a. Transportation Research Board. Accepted for publication in the TransportationResearch Record.

Godwin Badu-Marfo*, Bilal Farooq, and Zachary Patterson. A perspective on the challengesand opportunities for privacy-aware big transportation data. Journal of Big Data Analytics inTransportation, 2019b.

Ali Yazdizadeh*, Zachary Patterson, and Bilal Farooq. An automated approach from GPS tracesto complete trip information. International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology,2018.

Masoud Fallah Shorshani*, Marianne Hatzopoulou, Nancy Ross, Zachary Patterson, and ScottWeichenthal. Evaluating the impact of neighborhood characteristics on differences betweenresidential and mobility-based exposures to outdoor air pollution. Environmental science &technology, 2018.

Michael Widener, Leia Minaker, Taral Kamal Amadi, Jessica Reid, and David Hammond. Ac-tivity space-based measures of the food environment and their relationships to food purchasingbehaviours for young urban adults in Canada. Public Health Nutrition, 2018a.

Guilhem Poucin*, Bilal Farooq, and Zachary Patterson. Activity patterns mining in Wi-Fiaccess point logs. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 67:55–67, 2018.

Ricardo A Daziano, EOD Waygood, Zachary Patterson, and Mark ́eta Braun Kohlov ́a. Increa-sing the influence of CO2 emissions information on car purchase. Journal of Cleaner Production,164:861–871, 2017.

Saddier, Simon, et al. "Fickle or Flexible? Assessing Paratransit Reliability with Smartphones in Accra, Ghana." Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2650 (2017): 9-17.

Ricardo Daziano, Owen Waygood and Zachary Patterson. Increasing the Influence of CO2 Emissions Information on Car Purchase. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.07.001

Zachary Patterson, Javad Mostofi-Darbani*, Ali Rezaei*, and John Zacharias. Comparing Text-only and Virtual Reality Discrete Choice Experiments of Neighborhood Choice. Landscape and Urban Planning
, 157(January), pp. 63-74, 2017.

Amir Zahabi, Ajang Ajzachi and Zachary Patterson. Transit Trip Itinerary Inference with GTFS and Smartphone Data. Accepted in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2017.

Simon Saddier, Zachary Patterson, Alex Johnson and Natalie Wiseman. Fickle or Flexible? Assessing Paratransit Reliability with Smartphones in Accra, Ghana. Accepted in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2017.

Zachary Patterson and Kyle Fitzsimmons. DataMobile Travel Survey Experiment. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board January, Vol. 2594, pp. 35-43, 2016.

Seyed Amir Zahabi, Annie Chang, Luis Miranda-Moreno and Zachary Patterson. "Exploring the link between the neighborhood typologies, bicycle infrastructure and commuting cycling over time and the potential impact on commuter GHG emissions." Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 47 (2016): 89-103.

Simon Saddier, Zachary Patterson, Alex Johnson, Megan Chan. Mapping the Jitney Network with Smartphones in Accra, Ghana: The AccraMobile Experiment. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board January, Vol. 2581, pp. 113-122, 2016.

Natalie Wiseman and Zachary Patterson. Testing Block Subdivision Algorithms. Journal of Geographical Systems, 18(1), pp 17-43, 2016.

Amir Zahabi, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Zachary Patterson, and Philippe Barla. Spatio-temporal analysis of car distance and greenhouse gases and the effect of built environment: A latent class regression analysis. Accepted in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 77, pp. 1-13, 2015.

Zachary Patterson and Steven Farber. Potential Path Areas and Activity Spaces in application: A review.  Transport Reviews35(6), 679-700, 2015.

Amir Zahabi, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Zachary Patterson, and Philippe Barla. Impacts of built environment and emerging green technologies on daily transportation greenhouse gas emissionsin Quebec cities: Disaggregate modeling approach. Transportation, 2014, p. 1-22.

Zachary Patterson, Simon Saddier, Ali Rezaei and Kevin Manaugh. 2014. Use of the Urban Core Index to Analyze Residential Mobility: The Case of Seniors in Canadian Metropolitan Regions. Journal of Transport Geography - DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2014.08.013

Mario Cano-Perdomo, Ali Rezaei, Zachary Patterson, Nicolas Saunier and Luis Miranda-Moreno. 2014. Pedestrian Preferences with Respect to Roundabouts - A Video-based Stated Preference Survey. Accident Analysis and Prevention. Volume 70, pp. 84-91.

Annelise Grube-Cavers and Zachary Patterson. 2014. Urban Rapid Rail Transit and Gentrification in Canadian Urban Centres – A Survival Analysis Approach. Urban Studies. DOI - http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/0042098014524287

Amir Zahabi, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Zachary Patterson, and Philippe Barla. Urban transportation greenhouse gas emissions and its link with urban form, transit accessibility and emerging green technologies: A Montreal case study. Transportation Research Record. Volume 2375, pp. 45-54.

Commuting trade-offs and distance reduction in two-worker households. Julien Surprenant-Legault, Zachary Patterson and Ahmed El-Geneidy. Transportation Research A: Policy and Practice. Volume 51, May 2013, Pages 12–28

Christopher Harding, Zachary Patterson, Luis Miranda-Moreno and S. Amir Zahabi. A spatial and temporal comparative analysis of the effects of land use clusters on activity spaces in three Quebec Cities. Accepted for Publication in Environment and Planning B, Special Issue on Activity Space Research from the 2012 IATBR.

Jacob Larsen, Zachary Patterson and Ahmed El-Geneidy. Build it. But where? The Use of Geographic Information Systems in Identifying Locations for New Cycling Infrastructure. International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, 7(4), 299–317, 2013.

Christopher Harding, Zachary Patterson and Luis Miranda-Moreno. Modeling the Effect of Land Use on Activity Spaces. Transportation Research Record (2323), 2012.

Amir Zahabi, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Zachary Patterson, and Philippe Barla. A methodology for evaluating the effect of land-use, parking policy and transit supply on mode choice of downtown commuters. Journal of Transportation and Land Use, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2012.

Nithya Vijayakumar, Ahmed El-Geneidy, and Zachary Patterson. Driving to suburban rail stations: Identifying variables that influence driving distances. Transportation Research Record (2219): 97–103, 2011.

Nikolaus Fries, Gerard de Jong, Zachary Patterson, and Ulrich Weidmann. Market potential and value of sustainable freight transportation chains - a discrete choice approach. Transportation Research Record, 2168:33-42, 2010.

Zachary Patterson, Mark Kryvobokov, Fabrice Marchal, and Michel Bierlaire. Disaggregate models with aggregate data: Two UrbanSim applications. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 3(2), 2010.

Zachary Patterson, Gordon O. Ewing, and Murtaza Haider (2010). Howdifferent is carrier choice for third party logistics companies? A mixed-logit approach. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics andTransportation, 46, pp. 764-774, 2010.

Zachary Patterson and Michel Bierlaire. Development of prototypeUrbanSim models. Environment and Planning B:Planning and Design, 37(2):344-366, 2010.

Zachary Patterson, Gordon Ewing, and Murtaza Haider. The potential for premium-intermodal services to reduce freight CO2 emissions in the Quebec City - Windsor Corridor. Transportation Research D: Transport and Environment, 13(1):1-9, 2008.

Zachary Patterson, Gordon Ewing, and Murtaza Haider. Shipper mistrust of rail use: First stated preference carrier choice survey for the Quebec City - Windsor Corridor. Transportation Research Record, 2008:67-74, 2007a.

Zachary Patterson, Gordon Ewing, and Murtaza Haider. A gender-based analysis of work trip mode choice of suburban Montreal commuters using stated preference data. Transportation Research Record, 1924:85-93, 2005a.


TRIP Lab

TRIP Lab Smartphone Travel Survey Platform Workshop
May 25 and 26, Concordia University

Download the Workshop Agenda

The TRIP Lab is holding a 2-day workshop on Smartphone Travel Surveys and how to use its new Smartphone Travel Survey Platform at Concordia University.

The TRIP Lab platform enables researchers to create their own free smartphone travel survey application.

The Platform is useful for anyone who wants to collect and analyze data on commuting and urban travel behaviour, including:

  • transportation planning authorities: transit operators, ministries of transportation, etc.
  • academic researchers: faculty and students from civil engineering, urban planning, geography, health, etc.
  • not-for-profits and community groups with a transportation focus
Registration is free, but spaces are limited.

Required: Smartphone [Android 4.1 (Jellybean, API 16) or Apple (iOS8.0 and above,  iPhone4S or newer)]

To register, please write to triplab.workshop@gmail.com


Welcome to the lab

The Transportation Research for Integrated Planning (TRIP) Lab was founded in October 2011 as part of a Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant associated with a Tier-II Canada Research Chair in Transportation and Land-use Linkages for Regional Sustainability. The TRIP lab is equipped with high-powered computers and servers for geographical and statistical analysis and is able to house up to 10 student researchers. It is also home to unique and expansive transportation and land-use data for Montreal as well as other major urban regions across the country. Analysis of this data is made possible by cutting-edge and sophisticated software for geographical analysis, transportation modeling and statistical analysis.

Research in the TRIP lab focuses on the modeling of transportation, the environment, land-use and their linkages. It also involves using new technologies to collect data on where people decide to live and how they move around the city. Recently, a smartphone  travel survey application and platform (Itinerum™) has been developed to conduct origin-destination of members of the Concordia community.

Research on urban transportation at Concordia:

Current opportunities (with funding) in the TRIP Lab

PhD student to work on the DataMobile Smartphone Survey App Project (itinerum.ca). Co-supervision with Prof. Bilal Farooq of Polytechnique Montréal. Expertise required: spatial database programming and management (e.g. Postgres/PostGIS); Python, JavaScript, Processing; Socket programming, distributed systems; Machine learning. Find out more here.

Master's or PhD students interested in inference from, and processing of, transportation data collected with smart phones. Experience with (or willing to learn about) Open Source GIS (e.g. QGIS) and programming (especially Python) required.

Master's or PhD students with capacity or experience in smartphone app (iOS and Android) development for transportation-related data collection.

Current students


Name Degree Research Area Co-supervisor Unit
Parham Hamouni MSc. Data Science
C. Alecsandru BCEE, Concordia
Kyle Fitzsimmons BA Data Collection with Smartphones

GPE, Concordia
Guilhem Poucin MEng Pedestrian Behaviour and WIFI Data
Bilal Farooq
Polytechnique Montreal
Mohsen Rezeai MSc Inference from Smartphone Data

GPE, Concordia
Natalie Wiseman MSc Block Subdivision Algorithms
GPE, Concordia
Ali Yazdizadeh MSc Visual SP Surveys
GPE, Concordia
Dr. Amir Zahabi
Postdoc       
Transit Route Inference from Smartphone Data

GPE, Concordia

Former students

Name Degree Research Area Co-supervisor Unit
Mario Cano Perdomo
MSc
Stated Choice and Roundabout Design
Nicolas Saunier
GPE, Concordia
Megan Chan
MEnv Intern
Transit Route Mapping in Accra, Ghana

GPE, Concordia
Javad Darbani   
MSc
Video Games and SP Surveys

GPE, Concordia
Annie Chang     
MEng
Land use and emissions
Miranda-Moreno Civ. Eng., McGill
Sabrina Chan MEng Transit and emissions  Miranda-Moreno Civ. Eng., McGill
Annelise Grube-Cavers MSc Transport and gentrification 
GPE, Concordia
Christopher Harding MSc Land-use and emissions 
GPE, Concordia
Sean Mayzes
Summer Intern
Transit Route Mapping in Accra, Ghana

GPE, Concordia
Dr. Ali Rezeai Postdoc Stated and Revealed Household Location Choice
GPE, Concordia
Razafindramary Robson BEng Smart phone data collection
Soft. Eng., Concordia
Simon Saddier Intern Baby boomer res. choice
GPE, Concordia
Sydney Swaine-Simon BEng Unity and Stated Choice Surveys
Soft. Eng., Concordia
Nikhil Tangirala
Summer Intern
Transit Route Mapping in Accra, Ghana

Geography, McGill
Phil Viau USRA Scholar Smartphone data collection
GPE, Concordia

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