Egor Kotov

Egor Kotov is a spatial data scientist and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Spatial Modelling Lab within the Department of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University. He is also a researcher with the Sociodemography Research Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, and an affiliate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, where he is associated with the Laboratory of Migration and Mobility and the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. Additionally, Egor serves as a computation and reproducibility co-editor at the Population Dynamics Lab.

Egor focuses on analysis of digital trace data to study human mobility patterns and its effects on disease dynamics and spatial inequalities.

Access the website of the Beyond the Chatbox workshop at ekotov.pro/2026-09-agentic-workshop/

Latest research

Kotov, E., Vidal-Tortosa, E., Cantú-Ros, O. G., Burrieza-Galán, J., Herranz, R., Gullón Muñoz-Repiso, T., & Lovelace, R. (2026). spanishoddata: A package for accessing and working with Spanish Open Mobility Big Data. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.

Pardo-Araujo, M., Kotov, E., Alonso, D. & Bartumeus, F. (2026). Understanding Mosquito Vector Invasion Pathways: Synergistic Effects of Human Mobility, Climate and Natural Dispersal. Ecology Letters.

Renninger, A., Kotov, E., & Cabrera, C. (2026). The scales of urban mobility shape socioeconomic mixing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.28734.

Kotov, E., & Denecke, E. (2024). Expanding the Lifespan of Software for Demographic Analysis with Containers: An Application of Spatial Sampling. The Denominator. Population Dynamics Lab.

Selected R packages and software

R package to access Spanish origin-destination matrices based on aggregated mobile phone based human mobility data. Featured by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility of Spain. In collaboration with Robin Lovelace and Eugeni Vidal-Tortosa.

R package to manage Java environments from R in {renv}-like manner. Companion to {r5r} and many other Java-dependent R packages.

R package to dump source code, docs and vignettes or other R packages to plain text to feed to LLMs.

R package to interactively explore routes calculated with {r5r} package in a Shiny app, e.g. for troubleshooting routing problems.

R package to install and control Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) backend executables, prepare routing data and run/stop a local OSRM server. Also comes with a GUI.

Fast & memory-efficient functions to analyze and manipulate large spatial data sets. It leverages the fast analytical capabilities of `DuckDB` and its `Spatial` extension while maintaining compatibility with R’s spatial data ecosystem to work with spatial vector data. Collaboration: Adrián Cidre, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Egor Kotov

R package to create Eurostat GISCO-compatible and INSPIRE-compliant grids from sf objects or bounding boxes. Grids are always aligned to rounded coordinates as per INSPIRE requirements.

More software and R packages…

Recent presentations

Talk: Scaling individual traces to regional realities: Quantifying the gap between transit availability and realized mobility at 18th NECTAR Conference, Munich, Germany, July 2026
Talk: spanishoddata: A package for accessing and working with Spanish Open Mobility Big Data at 29th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Tartu, Estonia, June 2026. PDF slides
Talk: From Spatial Accessibility to Realized Mobility: Evaluating Personal Constraints Using Population-Representative GPS Data at Mobile Tartu 2026, Tartu, Estonia, June 2026
Talk: Daily Mobility Validation: Biases in Spanish Open Mobility Data at Mobile Tartu 2026, Tartu, Estonia, June 2026. Online slides
Poster: A causal analysis of human mobility on colonization of disease-carrying tiger mosquitoes in Spain at 29th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Tartu, Estonia, June 2026. Paper, PDF poster

More conference presentations, recorded talks, and teaching materials.