Towards a Trajectory-powered Foundation Model of Mobility

Abstract

This paper advocates for a geospatial foundation model based on human mobility trajectories in the built environment. Such a model would be widely applicable across many important societal domains currently addressed independently, including transportation networks, data-driven urban planning, tourism, and sustainability. Unlike existing large vision-language models, trained primarily on text and images, this foundation model should integrate the complex spatiotemporal and multimodal data inherent to mobility. This paper motivates this challenging research agenda, outlining many downstream applications that would be significantly impacted and enabled by such a model. It then explains the critical spatial, temporal, and contextual factors that such a model must capture in trajectories. Finally, it concludes with several research questions and directions, laying the foundations for future exploration in this exciting and emerging field.

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