At the upcoming American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, we (Alison Heppenstall, Na (Richard) Jiang, Gary Polhill, Andrew Crooks, Raja Sengupta, Suzana Dragicevic, Sarah Wise, Jeon-Young Kang) have organized 3 sessions around the theme of Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges. This is part of the 10th Anniversary Symposium on Human Dynamics Research. If you are at the AAG on Tuesday the 16th of April and have the time it would be great if you could stop by and see the talks. Details are below. Sessions Abstract:  There is an urgent need for ..read more

In the past we have blogged about the challenges of agent-based modeling but one thing we have not written much about is the challenge of uncertainty especailly when it comes to model calibration. This uncertainty is a challenge when it when it comes to situations where various parameter sets fit observed data equally well. This is known as equifinality which is a principle or phenomenon in system theory that implies that different paths can lead to the same final state or outcome.  In a new paper with paper with Moongi Choi, Neng Wan, Simon Brewer, Thomas Cova and Alexander Hoh ..read more

Quantifying community resilience especially after a disaster is an open research challenge. However, with the growth in mobility datasets such as SafeGraph we are being given new opportunities to study how communities rebound from disaster.   To this end, in a new paper with Qingqing Chen and Boyu Wang entitled "Community resilience to wildfires: A network analysis approach by utilizing human mobility data" which was published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems we develop a framework to quantify resilience after a disaster using network analysis. To sh ..read more

Over the last year or so there has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) like ChatGPT. In a recent editorial in Environment and Planning B written by Qingqing Chen and myself we discussed how LLMs could be used for lower the barrier for researchers wishing to study urban problems through the lens of urban analytics. For example, analyzing street view images in the past required training and segmentation of such data which a time consuming and a rather technical task. But ..read more

The other week Yingjie Hu and myself co-organized a session entitled "Spatial Data Science for Disaster Resilience" as part for the 4th Spatial Data Science Symposium (SDSS 2023).  Session Abstract:  Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, tornados, wildfires, earthquakes, and blizzards, pose significant threats to people and society. The availability of various geospatial data sources (e.g., drone-collected images, mobile phone location data, social media data, and sensor network data) combined with the advancement of statistical and machine learning models provide great ..read more

Following on from the last post, we (Hossein Amiri, Shiyang Ruan, Joon-Seok Kim, Hyunjee Jin, Hamdi Kavak, Dieter Pfoser, Carola Wenk and Andreas Zufle and myself) have a paper in the Data and Resources track at the 2023 ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems entitled "Massive Trajectory Data Based on Patterns of Life".   This Data and Resources paper introduces readers to a large sets of simulated individual-level trajectory and location-based social network data we ..read more

In the past the blog has explored the creation of social networks for models. Keeping with this vain of research, I was fortunate to work with Ketevan Gallagher, Taylor Anderson and Andreas Züfle to consider the role of location of individuals when generating social networks. This work has resulted in a new paper entitled "Synthetic Geosocial Network Data Generation"  which was presented at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Location-based Recommendations, Geosocial Networks and Geoadvertising (LocalRec 2023). If this sounds of interest, below you can read the ab ..read more

Over the years we have developed several agent-based models that have explored various aspects of farming, ranging from farmers selling their land for development to that of water reuse. Keeping with this theme, we have a new paper with Kazi Ullah and Gbadebo Oladosu in the "Journal of Environmental Management" entitled:  "Evaluating the incentive for soil organic carbon sequestration from carinata production in the Southeast United States".    In this new paper we developed an agent-based model to evaluate what incentives might be needed for farmers to sequester soil organic c ..read more

In the past, this blog has explored several aspects of Detroit, such as how well its covered with Volunteered Street View Imagery or how through the use of agent-based models one can explore issues with urban shrinkage. Keeping up with the theme of shrinkage and Detroit but at the same time utilizing our growing interest in natural language processing (especially topic modeling) we (Na (Richard) Jiang, Hamdi Kavak, Wenjing Wang and myself) have a new paper entitled "Leveraging newspapers to understand urban issues: A longitudinal analysis of urban shrinkage in Detroit" published in Environmen ..read more

As part of the The 10th Anniversary Symposium on Human Dynamics Research which will take place at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii  between Tuesday, April 16 – Saturday, April 20, 2024 we are organizing a session(s) on Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges. If the session description is of interest, please feel free to submit an abstract (details are below). Session Description: There is an urgent need for research that promotes sustainability in an era of societal challenges ranging from climate change, population growth ..read more