Wejo Partners with University Consortium for Geographic Information Science to Advance GIS Research
Partnership with 60 member university consortium will drive location-based innovation, catalyze research initiatives, and improve navigation and mapping projects across the U.S.
Based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE, iguide.illinois.edu), is pursuing advances to transform geospatial data-intensive sciences as it integrates AI and cyberGIS, reproducible data-intensive analytics and modeling, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles, and innovative education and workforce development programs. Funded by NSF, this new national institute is enabling geospatial data-driven scientific discovery to better understand the risks and impacts of climate change and disasters, with a particular emphasis on food and water security.
Through its involvement with I-GUIDE, UCGIS is offering an annual opportunity for individuals at its member institutions to participate as they undertake their own short-term project in alignment with certain ongoing I-GUIDE activities. Suitable for PhD students, researchers, or faculty, the selected participants are eligible to receive a small stipend. Through their activities, UCGIS I-GUIDE Community Champions contribute to our outreach goals and advance I-GUIDE’s mission.
The Geospatial Software Institute (GSI) Conceptualization Project has announced 16 fellowships to researchers at 13 institutions to tackle COVID-19 challenges using geospatial software and advanced capabilities in cyberinfrastructure and data science. A full list of the fellows, with biographies and project information, is at https://gsi.cigi.illinois.edu/geospatial-fellows-members/. The Geospatial Fellows program will enable diverse researchers and educators to harness geospatial software and data at scale, in reproducible and transparent ways; and will contribute to the nation’s workforce capability and capacity to utilize geospatial big data and software for knowledge discovery.
The GSI Conceptualization Project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and UCGIS is a partnering organization in the efforts, along with the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Technical and cyberinfrastructure support are provided by the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies (CyberGIS Center) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Built on the progress made by cyberGIS-related communities, the GSI conceptualization project is charged with developing a strategic plan for a long-term hub of excellence in geospatial software infrastructure, one that can better address emergent issues of food security, ecology, emergency management, environmental research and stewardship, national security, public health, and more.
Supported by the National Science Foundation, the Geospatial Software Institute (GSI) conceptualization project (https://gsi.cigi.illinois.edu), along with its partners such as the American Association of Geographers (AAG), Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), NORC at the University of Chicago, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), has recently created a Geospatial Fellows program to foster collaborative work on advancing COVID-19 research and education.
Apply by July 31, 2020. Find more info at https://bit.ly/GeospatialFellows and become a Geospatial Fellow for joining the collaborative fight against the COVID-19 crisis.
Are you teaching and learning about mapping diseases and other topics related to COVID-19? Remember that the GIS&T Body of Knowledge has helpful articles on classification and clustering, kernels and density estimation, point pattern analysis, problems with scale and zoning, statistical mapping, spatiotemporal representation, representing uncertainty, epidemiology, and public health, among many others that you might find helpful.
UCGIS is pleased to announce that Dr. Helena Mitasova, Professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Associate Director for Geovisualization at the Center for Geospatial Analytics, at North Carolina State University (NCSU), has been selected to receive its 2020 Research Award. Dr. Mitasova’s groundbreaking work in the methodological and theoretical developments of open source geospatial software are key to ongoing GIScience activity. With her specific expertise in both geomorphology and open source GIS, she has made fundamental and innovative contributions to 3-dimensional and spatio-temporal dynamics, such as development of open source software modules for spatial interpolation, topographic analysis, water flow simulations, and erosion modeling. For these, the International Environmental Modeling and Software Society awarded her their prestigious Biennial Medal for outstanding contributions to environmental modeling and software (2006). Her co-authored book, Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach (3rd ed., 2008), is one of the most widely cited monographs in the GIScience discipline. Other co-authored books include Tangible Modeling with Open Source GIS (2nd ed., 2018), and GIS-based Analysis of Coastal Lidar Time-Series (2014).
Dr. Mitasova played a critical role in establishing the first Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Lab in the United States (NCSU OSGeoREL, now the NCSU GeoForAll Lab), which subsequently became a primary node the OSGeo global network of GeoForAll labs. Her long-term contributions to open source geospatial software development and applications have also been recognized by an Excellence in Development award from the Open Geographic Information Systems Foundation (1994), the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software from OSGeo (2010), and the Waldo Tobler GIScience Prize for outstanding and sustained contributions to the discipline, Austrian Academy of Sciences (2018).
UCGIS is a partner in a $1 million grant from a new interdisciplinary NSF program to foster building an "open knowledge network" for spatial decision support technologies. The inspiration for this type of network comes from Tim Berners-Lee's (best known founder of the World-wide Web) vision for the "semantic web," which applies tags with relationships to information on the Internet, allowing computers to do basic reasoning for improving search results and answering questions. Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant all use these technologies.
Individuals from UCGIS’s leadership group are members of a team of 13 researchers and practitioners from 10 different institutions and organizations who are collectively focused on spatial decision support (SDS) systems, a systematic approach that improves access to tools for analyzing geographic data. Despite many successful applications, SDS contributions are limited by challenges in integrating information across complex organizational networks and across an array of data and tools developed for narrow (often disciplinary) applications. The project is being led by PI Sean Gordon, research faculty at Portland State University, which is a UCGIS member institution. "The proliferation of online mapping technologies has greatly increased access to and utility of these kinds of tools, and a logical next step is increasing our ability to find the appropriate data and tools for your problem and link these together for more complex analyses," says Gordon. Through engaging stakeholders in three applied case studies (the management of wildland fire, water quality, and biodiversity conservation), the interdisciplinary project team will develop and test participatory and automated methods for finding and sharing decision-relevant information using semantic web technologies.
Papers in Cartography & Geographic Information Science, available for free (open-access) but only through Thursday, May 31, 2018. Thank you, Taylor and Francis publishers.
Xinyue Ye, Qunying Huang & Wenwen Li (2016) Integrating big social data, computing and modeling for spatial social science, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 43:5, 377-378, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2016.1212302