IGUIDE Logo

 UCGIS I-GUIDE Community Champions, 2021-22

UCGIS I-GUIDE Community Champions expand the community reach of I-GUIDE.  They participate directly with I-GUIDE's activities and contribute to outreach as we pursue a range of broad impacts. The vision is that these individuals would each propose to work on a small-scale project of their own design that would align with that year's proposed I-GUIDE focal areas. For Year 1 of the project (October 1, 2021 - September 30, 2022), the focus of the Community Champions’ work will have direct relevance for the synergistic activities between the UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge and its applications for workforce and professional development emerging from I-GUIDE activities with spatial data science. 

 

Zhe Zhang TAMU

Zhe (Sarina) Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Texas A&M University

GIS&T Body of Knowledge and CyberGIS: From Educator Perspectives to Research Community Practices

CyberGIS represents a complex geospatial system that connects many interdisciplinary fields by combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities. The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (GIS&T BoK) aims to maintain a comprehensive collection of topics for the domain, but the technological advances, the concepts, skills, and practices required to utilize CyberGIS are not well defined in the GIS&T BoK and there is a disconnect between the topics currently included (most often identified by educators) and the challenges that students have faced when implementing CyberGIS. During my project, I will be comparing was has been identified as key topics of CyberGIS via the BOK and other CyberGIS publications with what can be gleaned as high value, popular, or "actually useful" according to various web-based GIS thread discussions. 

 

Yue Lin Ohio State

Yue Lin, Ph.D. Student, Department of Geography, the Ohio State University

Location privacy and confidentiality: Towards ethical geospatial big data harnessing

Geospatial data-intensive sciences revolve around gathering, mining, and sharing geospatial data. However, these activities have sparked widespread public concern about compromising individual privacy. The purpose of this project is to contribute to ethical geospatial data handling by developing educational materials about location privacy and related topics. During my project, I developed two Jupyter notebooks that connected to new and existing topics in the GIS&T Body of Knowledge that focus on location privacy protection and privacy-preserving data visualization. These included 2020 Census and Differential Privacy and Geomasking Sensitive Individual-Level Data to Protect Location Privacy.  Both of these Jupyter notebooks are available as Open Educational Resources once you login to the CyberGISX Platform

 

Peter Kedron ASUPeter Kedron, Associate Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University

Creating Spatial Data Infrastructure that Supports the Development and Evaluation of Policy

 Gesospatial data, technologies, and services are now critical parts of the policy making and policy evaluation process. Through the United States' spatial data infrastructure, policy makers, state and federal agencies, and non-governmental partners access and use these assets to pursue their agency objectives. As the national spatial data infrastructure evolves, it must be evaluated and reshaped to create continued progress. As it grows I-GUIDE will become a part of the national spatial data infrastructure. During this project, I will collaborate with the I-GUIDE community to assess the institute's development and create processes and tools to promote effective knowledge exchange with the policy community. 


Learn more about I-GUIDE!  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.

I-GUIDE is one of the five institutes that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded through its Harnessing the Data Revolution initiative to explore questions at the frontiers of science and engineering. Over 40 researchers from UCGIS and other universities and organizations, including Columbia University, the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), Florida International University, Michigan State University, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Purdue University, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Utah State University, as well as other partners, are actively involved with the I-GUIDE project.