Taka is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and Media Lab mentored by Alex 'Sandy' Pentland and Esteban Moro. He will join NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) as an Assistant Professor in January 2024.

His research develops tools and models for analyzing large-scale human behavior data to better understand collective social dynamics during disruptions, and to improve the resilience of communities and cities to urban shocks (e.g., disasters, pandemics, and disruptive technology). Taka's recent works have focused on modeling the resilience of complex urban sociotechnical systems to natural hazards [e.g., PNAS 2022], human behavior analysis during and after disasters and pandemics [e.g., Scientific Reports 2020], quantifying the long-term dynamics of diversity in urban encounters in cities [Nature Communications 2023], and geospatial AI for transferring urban dynamics across cities [e.g., ACM KDD 2020, Nature Machine Intelligence 2022]. His research lies in the intersections of civil engineering, computational social science, network science, and urban informatics.

He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, advised by Satish V. Ukkusuri and Seungyoon Lee. Prior to that, he obtained his Masters and Bachelor Degrees from the University of Tokyo. He was a Data Science Consultant for the World Bank, in charge of human mobility data analytics for urban disaster risk management and transportation resilience modeling.