Thursday, October 18, 2012

Research Update

With the semester now well underway, I have been reflecting on some of the recent work we have been doing at George Mason University. This is currently taking two strands, the first being agent-based modeling and the second being deriving information from social media. Hopefully by the end of the semester, these two strands will be merged together.

One of the models we are working on is the movement of people across national boarders. Below is a visualization of our work looking at the movement of people across the US/Mexico border which a specific focus on Arizona.


Moreover, we have continued to work diseases and refugee camps. We are scaling up the model to represent the entire population of the Dadaab refugee camps along with verifying the model and exploring the spatial characteristics of the model (i.e the spread of cholera). If anyone will be at the annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International in Ottowa  Canada feel free to come and listen to our presentation. The movie directly below shows the spread of cholera in one camp, while the second movie shows how cholera can be spread throughout the camps by people becoming infected and moving between the different camps.



Some of this work has been feated in UPMagazine and Trajectory Magazine:

Metcalfe, M. (2012), The Bounds of Rationality, UP Magazine, May, Issue 5: 40-43.
Quinn, K. (2012), Visualizing the Invisible:GMU Pioneers a New Approach to Harvesting GEOINT, Trajectory Magazine, Fall, 11-12.

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