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UCGIS Presents
Summer Assembly Workshops
by John Wilson
 The Research Committee has arranged an
impressive series of workshops for the Summer Assembly. These workshops,
all included in the Assembly registration, cover many cutting-edge
research topics in GI Science.
The workshop presenters are:
- Michael Goodchild, Professor and
UCGIS 2002 Educator of the Year from the Department of Geography at
the University of California—Santa Barbara. Dr. Goodchild will
present the workshop Location-Based Services and Augmented Reality.
A location-based service (LBS) is defined as an information service
that knows where it is, and modifies the information it provides
accordingly. Augmented Reality (AR) is defined as the supply of
information to augment the user's senses. LBS and AR are rapidly
developing areas of technology, both heavily dependent on geographic
information and knowledge of location. The workshop begins with a
review of the technologies available for LBS and AR, and likely
developments in the next decade. Applications are discussed in
detail, ranging from the replacement of impaired senses, to
commercial LBS. A research agenda for AR and LBS is proposed, and
selected research questions are examined in detail.
- Axing Zhu, Professor in the
Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Dr.
Zhu was selected to present his research at the UCGIS 2003
Congressional Briefing this past February. His workshop is entitled
"Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction Techniques for Natural
Resources Inventory". The workshop introduces the techniques for
extracting knowledge on relationships between natural resources and
their environmental conditions. The extracted knowledge is needed
for conducting predictive mapping of natural resources (such as
soils) and for mapping the susceptibility of natural hazards (such
as landslides). The techniques to be discussed include: neural
networks, case-based reasoning, personal construct-based interview
techniques, decision-trees, and noise-reduction techniques for
spatial data mining. Each of the techniques will be introduced and
discussed using a real application (soil mapping). Attendees will
also gain hands-on experience of using some of the techniques.
Software and real world data set will be provided.
- Carolyn Merry, Professor in the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic
Science at The Ohio State University and UCGIS President. She will
present a workshop on "Using Remote Sensing Data in Engineering
Applications". This workshop will focus on current remote sensing
data sets available for use in GIScience research activities in the
engineering area. Image processing techniques available for
transforming remote sensing data into useful geophysical products
will be covered. Examples highlighted during the workshop will
include remote sensing of water quality, measuring ice flow in
Antarctica, using high-resolution imagery in transportation flow
applications, and monitoring and mapping land cover change.
Geometric and radiometric considerations of the various forms of
remote sensing imagery will be discussed. Sources and costs of
remote sensing data available for GIScience research will be
described. Future remote sensing systems that offer potential for
addressing science and engineering issues will be discussed.
- John Landis, Professor in the
Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California
at Berkeley. Dr. Landis will be presenting a workshop on "Modeling
and Projecting Urban and Exurban Growth and Its Impacts". Dr.
Landis’s workshop will demonstrate statewide procedures for modeling
urban and exurban growth, for developing spatially-explicit urban
growth scenarios, and for analyzing past and potential impacts of
urban growth on the natural landscape. The workshop will demonstrate
how commonly available polygon and raster datasets can be used to
identify past patterns of urban and exurban development; how the
same datasets can be used to develop and test spatially-explicit
statistical models of urban growth; and how the results of these
models can be used to develop future growth scenarios. The workshop
will draw on recent work undertaken for the California Resources
Agency as part of its Legacy Program. Participants will gain
practical experience building and using urban growth models and
procedures. Scenario-building datasets and software will be provided
to workshop participants via CD for onsite use in laptop computers.
Some knowledge of raster GIS and elementary statistics is assumed.
- Craig Knoblock, Professor and
Senior Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute,
University of Southern California. Dr. Knoblock’s workshop is
"Integrating Online and Geospatial Information Sources". With the
explosive growth of the Web there are now a huge number of sources
of data available online, including geospatial sources with maps and
imagery and an even larger number of sources with data that can be
placed into a geospatial context. The challenge is how to make
effective use of all this data by integrating the data across
diverse source types. In this workshop, Dr. Knoblock will describe
the techniques that his research group has developed for exploiting
online sources, including turning online sources into structured
data, linking records across different sources, planning to
dynamically compose sources, and efficiently integrating sources in
a networked environment. He will also describe techniques for
integrating online sources with various geospatial data sources,
including using online sources to automatically conflate vector data
with imagery, identify buildings in imagery, and predict the
location of moving objects (e.g. trains) along fixed trajectories.
- Marc Armstrong, Professor in the
Department of Geography, University of Iowa, and former member of
the UCGIS Board of Directors. Dr. Armstrong will present a workshop
on "Computational Geography: The Grid, the Un-grid, and Their
Wedding in the Chapel of Collaborative Tools". The focus of the
workshop will be placed on developing ideas about three areas of
emergent work in geographic information science, and how linkages
among these three areas can be established to promote research and
instruction. The first area is widely referred to as "grid
computing" because of its reliance on the use of a computational
network that is metaphorically akin to the electric grid: users need
not be concerned about the computational resources that they are
using any more than they need to care about the source of the
electricity that powers their refrigerator. Participants will focus
on how the grid came to be, how it can be accessed and what
potential it holds for GIScience. The second area, which Dr.
Armstrong refers to as the “un-grid”, concerns rapidly changing
developments in wireless computing with a particular emphasis placed
on their implications for GIScience (and geographic) education.
Next, the group will delve into the use of grid (and un-grid)
computing by groups of individuals who may be required to
collaborate in order to achieve one or more objectives. GIS tools at
present are not well-designed for group use and we will work towards
the specification of a typology of group tool needs. Finally,
workshop participants will consider how grid and wireless computing
can support group use of GIS tools. Participants will be asked to
read several articles in advance as background to the material that
will be covered in this workshop.
More information on the workshop
contents and schedules can be found on
http://www.ucgis.org/summer03/workshops.htm.
Research Committee Invites Senior GI Scientists To Speak at UCGIS Summer
Assembly
by John Wilson
The Research Committee has invited six
scientists to address the Summer Assembly. These plenary sessions will
be held Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings, June 17-19, 2003.
Tuesday’s plenary session will begin
with a presentation by UCGIS President Dr. Carolyn Merry entitled
"Aerial and Satellite Remote Sensing: What's Out There for Use in
GIScience Research?" She will be followed by Dr. Craig Knoblock speaking
on “Integrating Online and Geospatial Information Sources.”
Dr. Marc Armstrong will start the Wednesday plenary session with a talk
on “First We Shape Our Tools and Then Our Tools Shape Us: Computational
Imperatives in GIScience and Their Consequences.” Dr. John Landis will
conclude the morning session with a discussion on Modeling and
Projecting Exurban Growth and Its Impacts.”
The plenary series will continue on
Thursday morning with a presentation by A-Xing Zhu on “GIS, Artificial
Intelligence Techniques and Fuzzy Logic Concepts for Natural Resources
Inventory and Hazards Mapping.” The series will conclude with a talk by
Michael Goodchild on “The Fundamental Laws of GIScience.”
There will be time during the Assembly
to discuss these topics informally.
Each of these talks is also related to the workshop series presented
during the assembly Assembly.
Code of
Ethics
The topic of ethics rarely comes up at
UCGIS meetings, despite being part of our stated mission and goals. As
educators, we should be teaching ethics to our students. As researchers,
perhaps we should have our own code of ethics.
Will Craig will speak at the Summer
Assembly on the recently adopted URISA GIS Code of Ethics. Dr. Craig is
the chief author of the code with significant contributions from Harlan
Onsrud. Both Will and Harlan are past presidents of UCGIS and chairs of
the UCGIS Policy and Legislation Committee.
The code is at
http://www.urisa.org/ethics/code_of_ethics.htm . Dr. Craig will
review the code, its history, and contentious points during its review
and approval process.
URISA and the nascent GIS Certification
Institute will need relevant case studies and other teaching material to
help GIS professionals build ethical muscle. UCGIS should respond to
these challenges, but how?
Summer
Assembly Education Agenda
(coming soon)
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