Symposium 2020 > Schedule

UCGIS Symposium 2020 Schedule

Monday June 1 | Tuesday June 2 | Wednesday June 3 | Thursday June 4

Session Descriptions

UCGIS Research Committee Initiatives: Cyberinfrastructure-Decision Support Systems, GeoAI, and Convergence Research

Monday, June 1, 2020 from 1:00 - 2:30 pm EDT.  

This session covers the latest research topics related to the three UCGIS Research Committee Initiatives on Cyberinfrastructure-Decision Support Systems, GeoAI, and Convergence Research. Advanced cyberinfrastructure, intelligent spatial decision support systems (SDSSs), Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), and Convergence Research of GIScience, Humanities, and Social Sciences are providing novel approaches to tackling major research challenges related to geospatially heterogeneous yet interrelated phenomena from local to global scales. There have been various efforts of moving these research frontiers forward. This session aims to bring together interested researchers to discuss recent research progress and future research opportunities that can advance GIScience research and education.

Presenters:

• Yingjie Hu, University at Buffalo: NeuroTPR: A Neuro-net ToPonym Recognition Model for Extracting Locations from Social Media Messages
• Zhe Zhang, Texas A&M University: CyberGIS Enabled Decision Support Systems for Disaster Management
• Lei Zou, Texas A&M University: The Changing Roles of Social Media in Disaster Management
• Chen Xu, University of Wyoming: Convergence Research of GIScience, Humanities, and the Social Sciences 

Panel: GIScience and COVID-19

Monday June 1, 2020 from 3:00 - 4:30 pm EDT.  A recording of the panel can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel. 

This panel session brings together a variety of experts to explore how the Geographic Information Science community can address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, economic, social, environmental, political, transportation, and other systems, including highlights from several current GIS&T-COVID-19 research initiatives.

Panelists:

• Amy Friedlander, (Acting) Office Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) at the US National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Patricia Solis, Associate Research Professor of Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and Executive Director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, and Co-Founder and Director of YouthMappers
• Michael Emch, W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Geography and Epidemiology, and Fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Kathleen Stewart, Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Director of the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland
• Kathleen Stewart's slides can be accessed here
• Shaowen Wang, Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science; Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar; and an Affiliate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
• Shaowen Wang's slides can be accessed here

An object-graph-based tracking, representation, and analysis for tidal flat dynamics

A link to the recording of this session can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel. 

Chao Xu, Florida Atlantic University 

With the large amounts of time series of satellite data, recent studies have used multiple remote sensing-derived indexes to extract the tidal flat regions and represented them from the pixel-based perspective. This research provides an object-graph-based tracking, representation and analysis for the issue of tidal flats’ dynamic behaviors, which is an improvement on the existing pixel-based representation and analysis.

Advancing geospatial education for working professionals on campus and online

Tuesday June 2, 2020 from 1:30 - 2:30 pm EDT. 

A link to the recording of this session can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel. 

Working professionals come back to education for many reasons. To ensure we are fulfilling the needs of these returning students, educators should create learning environments that are flexible, stimulating, and enable students to develop a wide range of competencies relevant to their work in geospatial technologies and spatial data science. In this session we would like to initiate discussions on ways to advance our current learning models to ensure their relevance for working professionals, and to consider approaches that will succeed in online and residential learning environments.

As we have all had to move to an online education we have modified this session to include a panel discussion as highlighted below. Please come ready with questions and discussions

Panel discussion will include the topics of:

• Online Education: normal vs. crisis mode
• Reflections on supervising students

Presenters:

• Justine Blanford, University of Twente, Netherlands
• Guido Cervone, Pennsylvania State University
• Anthony Robinson, Pennsylvania State University
• Laura Harding, Engineer Research and Development Center, and Penn State University
• Mark Prettyman, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, and Penn State University

Capturing new opportunities in GIScience education

Tuesday June 2, 2020 from 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT. 

In this session, the UCGIS Education Committee invites the community to think about how the COVID-19 pandemic presents opportunities for improving GIScience Education rather than challenges that must be overcome to return to “the way things used to be.” Through rapid breakout discussions and collaborative document construction, we will collectively address how lessons learned from the pandemic can used to:

• Leverage students’ interests and motivate them to engage with their learning.
• Promote digital equity and improve access to technology.
• Improve assessment of learning outcomes.
• Employ universal design as a strategy for engaging students by offering flexible formats.
• Develop faculty capabilities to teach more effectively in a multi-modal environment.
• Enhance collaboration among faculty within and among institutions.
• Add value to the GIScience educational experience at our universities.

Conclusions from the session will be gathered in a Google Doc edited live by the discussants and participants. The Education Committee and UCGIS will use conclusions from the session to inform priorities in the coming years. Session participants will be invited to continue working with the committee to improve GIScience education as we go boldly into the future. 

Convergence, Reproducibility, and Replicability in GIScience: The Road Ahead and the Road Behind 

Wednesday June 3, 2020 from 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm. 

This session focuses on the topics of reproducibility and replicability (R&R) in geography and convergence in GIScience. We will focus on the effect of convergence on systems of knowledge production in GIScience with particular attention to R&R in the assessment and critique of geographic knowledge and workflow interoperability. We will present current inter-institutional efforts that have arisen from these workshops (e.g., NSF-RCN application, special issue in Annals of the AAG) and hope to lead a discussion of future collaborative opportunities. Finally, we will discuss approaches in research and teaching that integrates open science, critical GIS, and R&R.

Presenters:

• Peter Kedron, Arizona State University
• Joseph Holler, Middlebury College
• Bandana Kar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Workshop: Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR)

A recording of this workshop can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel.  A second instance of this workshop will be offered in summer 2020; click here if you would like to receive an email notice when it is scheduled.

Workshop Presenter: Mehak Sachdeva, Arizona State University

Workshop Contributors:

• Ziqi Li, Arizona State University
• Taylor Oshan, University of Maryland
• Stewart Fotheringham, Arizona State University
• Wei Kang, University of California, Riverside
• Levi Wolf, University of Bristol
• Hanchen Yu, Arizona State University

This two-hour workshop will introduce participants to the local spatial modeling technique MGWR. The presenter will host a Zoom session with participants and introduce the fundamental theoretical and technical foundation required to understand the tool using online presentations on Google slides (open to participants to easily follow along). Subsequently, the presenter will walk through an application of the method using Google Colaboratory where the code and data used to run the example will be provided for open access to the participants. Participants will also be given a hands-on introduction to the types of research problems that can be investigated with the tool and will learn how to prepare data for implementation in the software followed by critical visualization of the results.

The workshop will consist of three parts. In the first part, the presenter will provide a discussion on the biases often introduced in local models due to insufficient consideration of process scale and the methodology employed in the development of MGWR to overcome it. Building on this foundation, participants will then be guided through a worked example implementing a hedonic housing price model for Seattle, WA. The presenter will guide participants through hypothesis formation, development of the spatial model, and implementation of that model using the open-source MGWR package in Python. The presenter will then introduce the various outputs obtained from fitting the model and will explain the interpretation of the results. In the final part of the workshop, the presenter will demonstrate a visualization protocol that will allow participant to graphically display results. The presenter will conclude the workshop with a short discussion on other examples applying the technique and future research avenues.

The MGWR Python package is an open source package and is available on Github. The workshop datasets, python code notebook on Google Colaboratory and presentation slides on Google slides will be made available to participants prior to the workshop. The Python code will especially be shared and walked through the workshop to facilitate future participant application/exploration with the software.

The Evolution of GIS Support in Academic Libraries

Thursday June 4, 2020 from 1:00 - 1:30 pm EDT.   A recording of this session can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel.

David Cowen, Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina, and Esri

This paper reports on the role that academic libraries play in providing support for GIS related services. Findings from a review of literature, interviews and a survey indicate that libraries are responding to new GIS related opportunities and demands. Over the past 25 years the expansion of services has followed a classic pattern of the diffusion of innovation. The evolution has been fueled by dramatic changes in technology and increased awareness. While libraries at a few major research universities participated in a GIS literacy program in the early 1990s most librarians were not ready to deal with GIS technology. The development of user-friendly software on common desktop computers served as a catalyst for adoption in this century. In the current stage access to online services and massive collections of GIS themes enable an academic library to serve as a focal point for campus GIS support including GIS day, licensing, and training. It is common to find librarians supporting “GIS Lite” applications such as Story Maps that subsequently lead to more sophisticated spatial analysis. Most noteworthy in this evolution has been the emergence of several libraries as GIS technology leaders. Using open source code, they are developing and promoting sophisticated geographic search catalogs. These online catalogs supported by consortiums of universities (i.e. the Big Ten) post links to data that can be discovered, previewed, and downloaded. These services are promoting serendipitous discovery and facilitate required long term archival support for research data sets.

Community-based Research Experiences Abroad for Undergraduates

Thursday June 4, 2020 from 1:30 - 2:00 pm EDT.   A recording of this session can be found on the UCGIS YouTube channel.

Tim Hawthorne, University of Central Florida

Our NSF REU Site in Belize provides international research experiences for a diverse group of U.S. undergraduates to engage in summer fieldwork with a variety of community partners and across disciplines. We use Participatory GIS (PGIS) to explore flooding and erosion in a data-scarce context through spatial storytelling. We employ qualitative sketch mapping along with GIS and drone imagery as a way to visualize local knowledge about community perceptions of flooding.