Michael Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London where he was a long-time Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). He has worked on computer models of cities and their visualization since the 1970s and has published several books, such as Cities and Complexity (MIT Press, 2005) which won the Alonso Prize of the Regional Science Association in 2011, and most recently The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013). His blogs www.complexcity.info cover the science underpinning the technology of cities and his posts and lectures on big data and smart cities are at www.spatialcomplexity.info . His research group is working on simulating long term structural change and dynamics in cities as well as their visualization. Prior to his current position, he was Professor of City Planning and Dean at the University of Wales at Cardiff and then Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the Royal Society (FRS), was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2004 and the 2013 recipient of the Lauréat Prix International de GéographieVautrinLud. This year 2015 he received the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his work on the science of cities.