Professor Song Gao was named the Clarivate’s Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers 2024, which marked his continuous third time (2022-2024) making onto the lists.
There are 15 researchers at UW-Madison to have earned this impressive distinction this year.
FROM CLARIVATE: Each researcher selected has authored multiple ESI Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science™ over the past decade. However, citation activity is not the sole selection indicator. This list, based on citation activity is then refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgment as we observe for evidence of community-wide recognition from an international and wide-ranging network of citing authors. Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, So the Highly Cited Researchers are 1 in 1,000.
The Thirteenth International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025) will be held in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 26-29 August 2025, hosted by the University of Canterbury in collaboration with the GIScience academic research community across New Zealand. GIScience 2025 is the flagship conference in geographic information science and continues the highly successful conference series which started in 2000.
The conference regularly attracts over 250 international participants from academia, industry, and government to discuss and advance the state-of-the-art in geographic information science. August 26 is dedicated to Workshops and Tutorials. The main conference runs from August 27 to 29 and includes a single refereed paper track and an abstract track for posters and demo submissions. GIScience research spans the gamut of interrelated discovery activities related to geographic information from the invention of new computational instruments, the gathering of data via observation or experimentation, and discovery of descriptive generalizations patterns in data through to the creation of explanatory theories and the testing of theories. The GIScience conference series seeks submissions that make fundamental advances to the field through this multifaceted process.
GIScience 2025 welcomes papers, posters and demos covering emerging topics and fundamental research findings across all sectors of geographic information science, including (but not limited to) the role of geographic information in geography, computer science, engineering, information science, linguistics, mathematics, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, social science, and geostatistics. We welcome participation from community members sharing work at various stages of development, including position pieces, works in progress, as well as full papers for inclusion in the conference proceedings.
Samantha T. Arundel, United States Geological Survey
Gengchen Mai, University of Texas Austin
Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna
The field of GeoAI is advancing at an astonishing speed. We are excited to witness the significant growth of GeoAI in terms of its methods, its diverse geospatial applications, and its increasing societal impacts. For example, GeoAI has been applied to advance our understanding of environmental and climate change on the earth, improve individual and population health, enhance community resilience in natural disasters, strengthen smart and connected communities, more accurately predict spatiotemporal traffic flows, support humanitarian mapping and policymaking, and more. From the perspective of methodological development, we have observed a paradigm shift from using task-specific models with supervised learning to leveraging the power of visual foundation models, large language models (LLMs), and multimodal foundation models to achieve zero-shot to few-shot geospatial learning. We have also seen an increasing body of pioneering research integrating spatial theories and principles into general AI model design to develop “spatialized” AI that best tackles spatial and spatiotemporal problems.
Building on the success of previous AAG GeoAI symposiums and continuing to push the cutting edge of GeoAI research and its societal impact, the 2025 symposium aims to bring together geographers, GI scientists, remote sensing scientists, computer scientists, health researchers, urban planners, transportation professionals, disaster response experts, ecologists, earth system scientists, stakeholders, and many others to share recent research outcomes and discuss challenges for GeoAI research in the following years.
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Representing Geographic Locations in AI Models (Panel discussion session; In-person session; Contact: Yingjie Hu, yhu42@buffalo.edu, University at Buffalo; Panelists: Gengchen Mai, University of Texas at Austin; Morteza Karimzadeh, University of Colorado Boulder; Yiqun Xie, University of Maryland College Park, Ziqi Li,Florida State University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Generative AI in GIScience: a research agenda towards autonomous GIS (Panel discussion session; In-person session; Contact: Zhenlong Li,zhenlong@psu.edu, Penn State University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Sustainability & Resilience I: Research Advances (Panel discussion session; in-person session; The organizing team)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Sustainability & Resilience II:: From Research to Real-World Applications (Panel discussion session; in-person session; The organizing team)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Current Developments and Concerns in GeoAI and CartoAI (Panel discussion session; In-person session; Contact: Aileen Buckley, Esri (abuckley@esri.com); Sam Arundel, sarundel@usgs.gov, U.S. Geological Survey)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Feature Detection and Recognition (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Sam Arundel, sarundel@usgs.gov, U.S. Geological Survey; Co-organizers: Wenwen Li, Arizona State University; Kevin McKeehan, HNTB, and Ernie Liu, U.S. Geological Survey )
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Spatially Explicit Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Gengchen Mai, gengchen.mai@austin.utexas.edu, University of Texas at Austin; Co-organizers:Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Zhangyu Wang, University of California Santa Barbara; Di Zhu, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Yiqun Xie, University of Maryland; Hao Yang, University of Georgia)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Spatial Analytics and Modeling (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Di Zhu, dizhu@umn.edu, University of Minnesota; Co-organizers: Guofeng Cao, University of Colorado, Boulder; Song Gao, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Peng Luo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: UrbanAI for Sustainable, Climate-Resilient Environments (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Steffen Knoblauch, steffen.knoblauch@uni-heidelberg.de, Heidelberg University; Co-organizers: Hao Li, Technical University Munich; Peng Luo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Filip Biljecki, National University of Singapore; Alexander Zipf, Heidelberg University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI and Urban Mobility Analytics (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Dan Qiang, dan.qiang@mail.mcgill.ca, McGill University; Co-organizers: Grant McKenzie, McGill University, Xiao Huang, Emory University; Yihong Yuan, Texas State University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Disaster Resilience (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Bing Zhou, bbz5159@psu.edu, Penn State University. Co-organizers: Zhenqi (Ryan) Zhou, University at Buffalo; Lei Zou, Texas A&M University; Yingjie Hu, University at Buffalo; Qunying Huang, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Marcela Suárez, Penn State University, Yi Qiang, University of South Florida; Manzhu Yu, Penn State University; Morteza Karimzadeh, University of Colorado Boulder)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Human Geography (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Xiao Huang, Emory University, xiao.huang2@emory.edu; Co-organizers: Siqin Wang, University of Southern California; Peter Kedron, University of California, Santa Barbara; John Wilson, University of Southern California)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Human-Centered Geospatial Data Science (Paper session; Hybrid session; Contact: Jiaxin Feng, Jiaxin.Feng@dartmouth.edu, Dartmouth College; Co-organizers: Hoeyun Kwon, Lehman College – The City University of New York; Yuhao Kang, UT Austin)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Social Sensing and GeoAI for Public Health (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Binbin Lin, bb2020@tamu.edu, Texas A&MUniversity; Co-organizers: Lei Zou, Texas A&M; Yi Qiang, University of South Florida; Xiao Huang, Emory University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Generative AI – Opportunities and Challenges for GIScience Research (Paper session; in-person session; Contact: Junghwan Kim, Virginia Tech, junghwankim@vt.edu Co-organizer: Kee Moon Jang, MIT; Jinhyung Lee, Western University; Yuhao Kang, UT Austin)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Spatial Data Science and GeoAI Ethics: Bridging Research and Education (Paper session; Hybrid session; Contact: Yue Lin, liny2@uchicago.edu, University of Chicago; Co-organizers: Hongyu Zhang, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Bing Zhou, Penn State University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Cartography (Paper session; Contact: Xiran Zhou, China University of Mining and Technology, xrzhou@cumt.edu.cn), Wenwen Li, Arizona State University)
To present your research in one of these sessions, please register and submit your abstract at https://aag.secure-platform.com/aag2025/. When you receive confirmation of your submission, please forward your confirmation email to the session organizers by November 14, 2024.
We are very glad to invite you to mark your calendar for joining the forthcoming Geospatial Data Science Speaker Series 2024-2025 events, which are hosted by the GeoDS lab in Geography and co-sponsored by the Data Science Institute @UW-Madison.
The first event of this semester will be jointly with the Geography Yi-Fu Lectures. We will first have Dr. Kevin Mwenda, an Associate Professor of Population Studies (Research) at the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) and the Director of the Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4), visiting UW-Madison and will present “Beyond Maps: Integrating Place and Space for Community Resilience” at 3:30 p.m.-4:30p.m., on October 18, 2024 (Friday), Science Hall 180.
We are very glad to invite you to mark your calendar for joining the forthcoming Geospatial Data Science Speaker Series 2024-2025 events, which are hosted by the GeoDS lab in Geography and co-sponsored by the Data Science Institute @UW-Madison.
The first event of this semester will be jointly with the Geography Yi-Fu Lectures. We will first have Dr. Krzysztof Janowicz, a distinguished University-Named Professor of Geoinformatics at the University of Vienna (Austria), visiting UW-Madison and will present “GeoMachina: What Designing Artificial GIS Analysts Teaches Us About Place Representation” at 3:30 p.m.-4:30p.m., on September 13, 2024 (Friday), Science Hall 180.
Please join us congratulating our senior student Ying Nie, who is currently an undergraduate majoring in computer science as well as a research assistant in the GeoDS Lab under Prof. Song Gao’s mentorship, just got the UW-Madison “Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship” and was awarded in the 2024 Chancellor’s Undergraduate Awards Ceremony!
The awarded research project is: Large Language Model for Intelligent Spatial Analysis Workflow Construction
Our GeoDS lab’s students and alumni recently attended the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2024 Annual Meeting held in Honolulu, HI. It was a great reunion for the GeoDS family at the conference!
Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field that integrates geospatial studies with AI advancements. In this webinar editors and authors of the recently published GeoAI Handbook discuss the fundamental concepts, methods, applications, and perspectives of GeoAI. The GeoAI Handbook is an excellent resource for educators, students, practitioners and decision-makers who are interested in utilizing AI technologies in a geospatial context.
Schedule:
20 mins: Round-table Q&A about the GeoAI Handbook: Maria Antonia Brovelli, Andrea Manara, and Song Gao
10 mins: Chapter 5: GeoAI for Spatial Image Processing: Wenwen Li and Samantha Arundel
10 mins: Chapter 7: Intelligent Spatial Prediction and Interpolation Methods: Di Zhu
10 mins: Chapter 10: Spatial Cross-Validation for GeoAI: Yingjie Hu
10 mins: Wrap-up
The GeoAI advancements provide promising solutions to address some of the United Nations SDGs but also pose concerns. For example, Chapter 3 presents some of the fundamental assumptions and principles that could form the philosophical foundation of GeoAI and spatial data science. It highlights the sustainability issue for training GeoAI and foundation models that could cause substantial electricity energy and resource consumptions and generate equivalent carbon emissions. Therefore, we need to call for Green AI for achieving the SDG-13: Climate Action. Chapters 13 and 14 discuss existing and prospective GeoAI tools to support humanitarian assistance practices and disaster responses using geospatial big data and machine learning methods, aiming to address the SDG-10: Reduce Inequality and SDG-11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Chapter 15 focuses on using GeoAI for infectious disease spread prediction to address the SDG-3: Good Health and Well-Being.
AI technologies are advancing rapidly, and new methods and use cases in GeoAI are constantly emerging. As GeoAI researchers, we should not purely hunt for latest AI technologies but should focus on addressing geographic problems and solving grand challenges facing our society as well as achieving sustainable development goals. We also need research effort toward the development of responsible, unbiased, explainable and interpretable GeoAI models to support geographic knowledge discovery and beyond. This GeoAI Handbook was completed in the middle of 2023. While it cannot summarize all GeoAI research in this one handbook, it provides a snapshot of current GeoAI research landscape and helps stimulate future studies in the coming years.
Greetings! We are very glad to invite you to mark your calendar for joining the forthcoming Geospatial Data Science Speaker Series Spring 2024 events, which are hosted by the GeoDS lab in Geography and co-sponsored by the Data Science Institute @UW-Madison.
We will first have Dr. Amr Magdy, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and a co-founding faculty member of the Center for Geospatial Sciences at UC Riverside, visiting UW-Madison and will present “Scalable Spatial Data Science for Social Scientists” 12:00 p.m.-1 p.m., on February 13, 2024 (Tue), Science Hall 140. Pizza lunch and coffee will be provided in the events.
The American Association of Geographers (AAG) Fellows is a recognition and service program that applauds geographers who have made significant contributions to advancing geography. Congratulations to Professor Song Gao who was recently selected into the 2024 AAG Fellows!
Dr. Song Gao is an associate professor of geography and the director of the Geospatial Data Science Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He has established himself as one of the thought leaders and highly cited scholars in the field of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and was heavily involved in the geospatial modeling of the spread of COVID-19. He has successfully mentored young scholars and students in GIScience, offered workshops and webinars for the AAG and other organizations, and is an associate editor for AAG’s International Encyclopedia of Geography and International Journal of Geographical Information Science. Dr. Gao’s involvement with cutting-edge data science and AI techniques, his commitment to taking on and solving important challenges, and his enthusiasm for working with different international organizations make him a strong asset to the AAG.
The new “Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence” edited By Drs. Song Gao (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Yingjie Hu (University at Buffalo), and Wenwen Li (Arizona State University) is now published! Dr. Michael F. Goodchild (University of California-Santa Barbara) wrote a Foreword to provide a historic context and recent advances to help the reader to understand the significant shift in the geographic sciences with AI.
This comprehensive handbook covers Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), which is the integration of geospatial studies and AI technologies such as machine (deep) learning and knowledge graph. It explains key fundamental concepts, methods, models, and technologies of GeoAI, and discusses the recent advances, research tools, and applications that range from environmental observation and social sensing to natural disaster responses. As the first single volume on this fast-emerging domain, the GeoAI handbook is an excellent resource for educators, students, researchers, and practitioners utilizing GeoAI in fields such as information science, environment and natural resources, geosciences, geography, and beyond!
By Philipe A. Dias, Thomaz Kobayashi-Carvalhaes, Sarah Walters, Tyler Frazier, Carson Woody, Sreelekha Guggilam, Daniel Adams, Abhishek Potnis, Dalton Lunga
We cannot wait to take our AAG 2024 GeoAI Symposium to Hawaii next year! Collaborating with 40+ colleagues across multiple continents, we have put together a series of paper and panel sessions. In the past year, we have been so excited to witness the rapid and continued growth of GeoAI, the advances in its methods and cross-domain applications. This year’s symposium will highlight these advances and will also include critical discussions on the issues of GeoAI and the societal challenges in its use in science and everyday life.
We welcome you to join us to present your papers, co-organize sessions, and serve as a panelist in our symposium. Your participation is key to helping us expand this exciting research community! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the symposium’s lead organizers. The CFP can be found in the attachment.
AAG 2024 GeoAI Symposium organizing team
Lead Organizers: Wenwen Li, Arizona State University Yingjie Hu, University at Buffalo Song Gao, University of Wisconsin, Madison Budhu Bhaduri, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Orhun Aydin, Saint Louis University Shawn Newsam, University of California, Merced Samantha T. Arundel, United States Geological Survey Gengchen Mai, University of Georgia Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna & University of California, Santa Barbara
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Science and the Science of GeoAI (Panel discussion session; in-person session; The organizing team)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI Foundation Models (Panel discussion session; in-person session; The organizing team)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Feature Detection and Recognition (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Sam Arundel, US Geological Survey; Co-organizer: Wenwen Li, Arizona State University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Spatial Analytics and Modeling (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Di Zhu, University of Minnesota; Co-organizers: Guofeng Cao, University of Colorado, Boulder; Song Gao, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Chaogui Kang, China University of GeoSciences)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Emerging Geo-Data Applications in Human Mobility Analysis (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Xiao Li, University of Oxford; Co-organizers: Xiao Huang, University of Arkansas, Haowen Xu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Yuhao Kang, University of South Carolina; Di Zhu, University of Minnesota)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Ecosystem Conservation and and Sustainable Geodesign (Contact: Orhun Aydin, Saint Louis University; Somayeh Dodge, University of California Santa Barbara)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Disaster Resilience I (Paper session; In-person session; Contact Bing Zhou, Texas A&M University. Co-organizers: Lei Zou, Texas A&M University;Yingjie Hu, University at Buffalo; Marcela Suárez, Penn State University, Yi Qiang, University of South Florida; Manzhu Yu, Penn State University; Morteza Karimzadeh, University of Colorado Boulder)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Urban Visual Intelligence (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Fan Zhang, Peking University, Co-organizer: Yuhao Kang, University of South Carolina; Filip Biljecki, National University of Singapore)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Spatially Explicit Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Gengchen Mai, University of Georgia; Co-organizers:Angela Yao, University of Georgia; Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna & UC Santa Barbara; Zhangyu Wang, University of California Santa Barbara; Di Zhu, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Cartography and Mapping (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Co-organizer: Jina Kim, University of Minnesota)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Responsible GeoAI: Privacy, Fairness, and Interpretability in Spatial Data Science (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Hongyu Zhang, McGill University; Co-organizers: Yue Lin, University of Chicago; Jinmeng Rao, Mineral Earth Sciences, Alphabet Inc.; Junghwan Kim, Virginia Tech; Song Gao, University of Wisconsin – Madison)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI for Sustainable and Computational Agriculture (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Jinmeng Rao, Mineral Earth Sciences, Alphabet Inc.; Co-organizers: Yuchi Ma, Stanford University; Jiahao Fan, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Hongxu Ma, Mineral Earth Sciences, Alphabet Inc.; Gengchen Mai, University of Georgia; Di Zhu, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Human-centered Geospatial Data Science (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Yuhao Kang, University of South Carolina; Co-organizers: Filip Biljecki, National University of Singapore)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoAI and Social Sensing for Human-Pandemic Dynamics (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Binbin Lin, Texas A&M University, Mingzheng Yang, Texas A&M University; Co-organizers: Lei Zou, Texas A&M University)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: GeoHealth Data Science (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Jiannan Cai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Co-organizer: Mei-Po Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: AI for Earth Observation (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Bo Peng, PAII, Ping An U.S. Research Lab; Co-organizer: Chenxi Lin, PAII, Ping An U.S. Research Lab ; Beth Tellman, University of Arizona; Bandana Kar, U.S. Department of Energy; Lexie Yang, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Yanghui Kang, University of California, Berkeley; Qunying Huang, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Di Zhu, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
GeoAI and Deep Learning Symposium: Characterization of Place and Human Patterns of Life (Paper session; In-person session; Contact: Junchuan Fan,Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Co-organizer: Joon-Seok Kim, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Licia Amichi, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
To present your research in one of these sessions, please register and submit your abstract at https://aag.secure-platform.com/aag2024/. When you receive confirmation of your submission, please forward your confirmation email to the session organizers by Nov. 16, 2023.
Abstract: In recent years we have seen substantial advances in foundation models for artificial intelligence, including language, vision, and multimodal models. Recent studies have highlighted the potential of using foundation models in geospatial artificial intelligence, known as GeoAI Foundation Models or Geo-Foundation Models, for geographic question answering, remote sensing image understanding, map generation, and location-based services, among others. However, the development and application of GeoAI foundation models can pose serious privacy and security risks, which have not been fully discussed or addressed to date. This paper introduces the potential privacy and security risks throughout the lifecycle of GeoAI foundation models and proposes a comprehensive blueprint for preventative and control strategies. Through this vision paper, we hope to draw the attention of researchers and policymakers in geospatial domains to these privacy and security risks inherent in GeoAI foundation models and advocate for the development of privacy-preserving and secure GeoAI foundation models.
Abstract: With the recent rapid advances of revolutionary AI models such as ChatGPT, foundation models have become a main topic for the discussion of future AI. Despite the excitement, the success is still limited to specific types of tasks. Particularly, ChatGPT and similar foundation models have unique characteristics that are difficult to replicate for most geospatial tasks. This paper envisions several major challenges and opportunities in the creation of geospatial foundation (geo-foundation) models, as well as potential future adoption scenarios. We also expect that a major success story is necessary for geo-foundation models to take off in the long term.
Nick Ruktanonchai (Principal Investigator) ,Virginia Tech
Shengjie Lai (Co-PI) , University of Southampton
Omar Saucedo (Co-PI) , Virginia Tech
Corrine Ruktanonchai (Co-PI) , Virginia Tech
Song Gao (Co-PI), University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert Holt (Co-PI) , University of Florida
Nicholas Kortessis (Co-PI), Wake Forest University
ABSTRACT
When people change where, when, and why they travel, there are effects on infectious diseases. People?s movements determine who is at risk of the disease and whether new cases are counted by local public health agencies. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people?s movements changed drastically and, in addition to COVID-19, influenza and Lyme disease cases also dropped nationwide. These drops in cases may be because people spent less time in high risk areas, or simply because people traveled to healthcare facilities less frequently, and so fewer cases are reported. Distinguishing between these alternatives is critical for understanding disease control and predicting disease spread, but is made difficult when travel patterns change dramatically. This problem is especially challenging because communities may modify travel patterns in response to local disease, which can, in turn, change how diseases spread in communities and how public health monitors disease. To determine the cause of case reductions as human movements changed, the Investigators will develop new mathematical models that account for the ways travel impacts both risk and detection, using data from mobile phones to inform transmission risk and using local surveys to inform underdetection rates. By developing this new collection of models, the Investigators will better understand how transmission and detection of various non-COVID-19 infections changed throughout the pandemic, recognize how this depends on the biology of the disease being considered, and predict how case numbers may change during future periods of significant community-level changes in travel.
Community-level travel patterns have multifactorial effects on the dynamics of any infectious disease. Major changes to travel patterns affect both transmission, as people spend more or less time in high-risk places, and detection, as people change their propensity to visit healthcare facilities. These factors also influence individual behaviour, because local increases in reported cases can cause people to change their travel further. This creates critically important feedback loops between transmission, detection, and travel. Depending on the interactions between these factors, changes to travel or transmission could lead to undercounting of cases or a harmful population-level response that leads to communities being exposed to more infections. As changes in community-level travel patterns become more likely with global factors such as climate change and emerging infectious disease threats, it becomes increasingly important for models to integrate their effects on both detection and transmission. The project addresses this need by developing novel models that account for the ways in which travel can simultaneously affect both transmission and detection, and be affected by reported and perceived disease risk. The Investigators will combine the models with mobility data obtained from SafeGraph and use local surveys to inform underdetection rates of key notifiable diseases across the New River Valley Health District of Virginia, and to develop a framework for predicting transmission and detection changes during future large-scale changes in travel. Central Appalachia is a key region for this work, as it experiences relatively high incidence of respiratory and Lyme diseases, and intervention adherence was especially low during the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This project is jointly funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and the Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES) in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE).
The 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023), which is a flagship conference in the field of GIScience, will be held 12 – 15th September, 2023. Leeds, UK. GeoDS lab members have two papers accepted as oral presentations.
Please join us in congratulating our GeoDS lab’s PhD students and undergraduate students’ recent awards and achievements!
Yuhao Kang:
2023 Waldo-Tobler Young Researcher Award in GIScience, by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) Commission for GIScience to encourage scientific advancement in the disciplines of Geoinformatics and/or Geographic Information Science.
Recently, Prof. Song Gao received the 2023 Emerging Scholar Award by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Specialty Group.
The AAG SAM Emerging Scholar Award The emerging scholar award honors early- to mid-career scholars who have made significant contributions to education and research initiatives that are congruent with the mission of AAG-SAM. The candidates must have received their Ph.D. within the last 10 years and must be a member of the AAG-SAM at the time that the person is being nominated.
Organizers: Rafael Pires de Lima, rlima@colorado.edu, University of Colorado Boulder; Co-organizers: Morteza Karimzadeh, University of Colorado Boulder, Guofeng Cao, University of Colorado Boulder, Andong Ma, University of Colorado Boulder
Organizers: Yingjie Hu, Song Gao, Wenwen Li, Dalton Lunga, Orhun Aydin, and Shawn Newsame
Panelists: Michael Goodchild, University of California Santa Barbara, A-Xing Zhu, University of Wisconsin, Madison, May Yuan, University of Texas Dallas, Orhun Aydin, Saint Louis University, Budhendra Bhaduri, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Organizers: Xiao Li, xiao.li@ouce.ox.ac.uk, University of Oxford; Co-organizers: Xiao Huang, University of Arkansas, Haowen Xu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Yuhao Kang, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Organizers: Gengchen Mai, gengchen.mai@gmail.com, University of Georgia; Co-organizers:Angela Yao, University of Georgia; Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Zhangyu Wang, University of California Santa Barbara
Organizers: Gengchen Mai, gengchen.mai@gmail.com, University of Georgia; Co-organizers:Angela Yao, University of Georgia; Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Zhangyu Wang, University of California Santa Barbara
Organizers: Gengchen Mai, gengchen.mai@gmail.com, University of Georgia; Co-organizers:Angela Yao, University of Georgia; Yao-Yi Chiang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Zhangyu Wang, University of California Santa Barbara
Organizers: Di Zhu, dizhu@umn.edu, University of Minnesota; Co-organizer: Guofeng Cao, University of Colorado, Boulder; Song Gao, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Organizers: Bing Zhou, spgbarrett@tamu.edu, Texas A&M University. Co-organizers: Lei Zou, Texas A&M University;Yingjie Hu, University at Buffalo; Marcela Suárez, Penn State University
Organizers: Yuhao Kang, yuhao.kang@wisc.edu, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Co-organizer: Fan Zhang, cefzhang@ust.hk, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Greetings! I am very glad to invite you to mark your calendar for joining the forthcoming Geospatial Data Science Speaker Series Spring 2023 events, which are hosted by the GeoDS lab in Geography and co-sponsored by the Data Science Institute, UniverCity Alliance, and GISPP @UW-Madison. We will have Dr. Filip Biljecki, the Director of Urban Analytics Lab from the National University of Singapore visit UW-Madison 11:45 a.m.-1 p.m., on March 28, 2023 (Tue), Science Hall 110and Dr. Fabio Duarte from the MIT Senseable City Lab on April 13 (Thur), Science Hall 140. Pizza lunch and coffee will be provided in the events.
Recently, Prof. Song Gao was invited to join the Associate Editors team ofInternational Journal of Geographical Information Science(IJGIS), which is a flagship international journal for publishing geographic information systems/science related research. Dr. Gao’s service term starts from January 1st, 2023.
Aims and Scope
The aim of International Journal of Geographical Information Science is to provide a forum for the exchange of original ideas, approaches, methods and experiences in the field of GIScience.
International Journal of Geographical Information Science covers the following topics:
Innovations and novel applications of GIScience in natural resources, social systems and the built environment
Relevant developments in computer science, cartography, surveying, geography, and engineering
Fundamental and computational issues of geographic information
The design, implementation and use of geographical information for monitoring, prediction and decision making
