METROTECH — IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, decisions about where to open a coffee shop, attract a retailer or fill a vacant storefront could soon be informed by artificial intelligence trained on how people move through the neighborhood.
A new collaboration research project between NYU Tandon and the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is using advanced AI models to better understand how people choose where to spend time and how those choices shape the local economy. The work aims to provide a practical tool for retail planning and economic development.
At the core of the project is a system that models thousands of individuals as “AI agents,” each representing a type of person in Downtown Brooklyn. Using mobile phone location data, demographic information and business attributes, researchers created a “synthetic population” of roughly 20,000 agents that simulate real-world behavior.
“We’re essentially building something like SimCity, but grounded in real human behavior,” said project lead Takahiro Yabe.
These agents can be used to test “what-if” scenarios, such as how foot traffic might change if a new retailer opens, a grocery store is introduced or a popular café closes.
✰✰✰
