Open Research Europe presents an interview with Dr. Afroditi Anagnostopoulou, a senior researcher and deputy head of the Transport Economics and Environment, Maritime and Air Transport Unit at the Hellenic Institute of Transport/Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece). Dr Anagnostopoulou leads the Transport Community Gateway on Open Research Europe.
This Community Gateway provides a multi-disciplinary space for research contributions across engineering and social science disciplines, such as digital technologies in automated and connected vehicles, transport infrastructure, logistics operations, aeronautics, and safety applications.
It also encourages responses to major socio-economic trends such as an aging population, community income, migration, and urbanization.
Read on to learn more about this Community Gateway and our Guest Advisor.
What is your research area, and how does it relate to the Transport Community Gateway?
My research interest is evaluating the economic and social impacts of the operation of transport systems and services. I examine the problems within the transport economics environment and develop the appropriate tools and techniques to address these problems.
What are the biggest challenges of being a researcher in your field?
Different challenges could be categorized into different levels of importance. The most important one lies in evaluating the impact of my research and ensuring that my work is impactful since I aim to meet the needs and solve society’s problems. In addition to that, research in this area needs to be competitive at an international level, as funding is a finite resource, and be communicated not only to the research community but to broader society as well, to ensure it is in the hands of those who can implement research in tangible ways.
What are the major questions that your research area tries to answer?
The major concern is utilizing the correct models and techniques for economic evaluation of transport systems. We are also concerned with assessing the role and impact of transport systems on an economy and the development of a country.
The use of appropriate economic analysis tools and effective socio-economic impact assessment techniques in the transport field is another important area for further research, as this allows for examining relationships and interactions between economic development and transport.
Why is open science important to you and researchers in your field?
I would summarize the most beneficial aspects of open science in the transport field in three main areas:
- open data, which helps transport researchers, including researchers of the transport economics sector, to test and validate their theories quicker and utilize more data for their studies
- open-source software, which reduces investment costs and eliminates the cost of licensing software products
- open access, which enables equal access to publications and gives higher visibility for the author.
Are there any challenges to participating in open science within your research area?
Yes. Some of the most significant challenges of open science in transport research (including the transport economics sector) include data ownership/Intellectual Property (IP), data security, and protection of commercial and confidential data, which can reduce the access to and utility of valuable data, or pose concerns when producing your data. Both governments and institutions need to consider them.
A recent publication from our Horizon 2020 project BE OPEN explored the challenges, constraints, and bottlenecks of open science in transport research and identified other issues, including inconsistency of open science policies from different stakeholders and access to funding schemes for research infrastructures and individual scientific achievements.
Discover research in the Transport Community Gateway
Some of the innovative work published within the Transport Community Gateway include:
- A Research Article by Buseli et al. which explores the efficiency of safety reports through different natural language processing techniques, an important aspect of air traffic management.
- A Research Article by Andrenacci et al. which explores the charging data of two European cities to determine the scale of infrastructure needed to meet the demands of electric vehicle users.
Explore the Transport Community Gateway today.
