Friday, March 21, 2014

AAG 2014: Geosimulation Models Sessions

If you going to this years AAG, you might be interested in our Geosimulation Models sessions which will take place on Wednesday the 9th of April from 10am (more details below).

Session Description: Since the publication of Geosimulation in 2004, the use of Agent-based Modeling (ABM) and Cellular Automata (CA) under the umbrella of Geosimulation models within geographical systems have started to mature as methodologies to explore a wide range of geographical and more broadly social sciences problems facing society. The aim of these sessions is to bring together researchers utilizing geosimulation techniques (and associated methodologies) to discuss topics relating to: theory, technical issues and applications domains of ABM and CA within geographical systems.



10:00 AM to 11:40,  Room 39, TCC, Fourth Floor , Chair: Suzana Dragicevic



12.40PM to 2.20PM, Room 39, TCC, Fourth Floor, Chair: Paul Torrens



2:40 PM to 4:20 PM in Room 39, TCC, Fourth Floor, Chair: Paul Torrens

Siyu Fan and Yichun Xie

We would also like to thank the following AAG specialty groups for sponsoring our sessions: Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty GroupCyberinfrastructure Specialty Group and the Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group  


Friday, March 07, 2014

Comparing the spatial characteristics cyber and physical communities

Readers of the blog know that I have an interest in social media, and how through it we can gain an understanding of society at large. The question is how does the cyber community reflect the corresponding physical community? To this end, papers from 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks which was held in conjunction with the 21st ACM SIGSPATIAL conference have just come out on the  ACM Digital Library. We presented a paper at the conference entitled "Comparing the Spatial Characteristics of Corresponding Cyber and Physical Communities: A Case Study" The abstract of the paper is as follows:

"The proliferation of social media over the past few years is presenting us with unique opportunities to sample opinions and interests at spatial and temporal resolutions previously unheard of. In order to make best use of this information though, we need a better understanding of the degree to which the cyber community that is observed through them can serve as a proxy for the corresponding physical community. In this paper we are making a contribution towards this issue by presenting a case study in which we compare spatial characteristics of a community both in the physical and cyber spaces. The key findings of our analysis relate to the selection of an appropriate level of spatial aggregation for analyzing social media content, and on the effect in the level of participation of the distance from the point of interest."


We hope you enjoy it.

Full reference: 
  • Lu, X., Croitoru, A., Radzikowski, J, Crooks, A. T. and Stefanidis, A. (2013), Comparing the Spatial Characteristics of Corresponding Cyber and Physical Communities: A Case Study, 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks, Orlando, FL, pp 11-14. (pdf)