Monday, July 01, 2024

Call for Abstracts: Future Map @ AGU


Call for Abstracts! 

At the 2024 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting to be held during the 9th to 13th of December in Washington, D.C., Carter Christopher, Wenwen Li, Gautam Thakur and myself are organizing a session entitled: “GC077: Future Map: The Convergence of Generative GeoAI, Population Synthesis, and Agent-Based Modeling to Develop Geographic Futures for Climate Assessments” 

Abstract
The climate community has long developed reliable climate models grounded in trusted Earth systems data and physics, but it has not been until recently that human dynamics and feedbacks have been viewed as a necessary coupling within these models. Including human dynamics within integrated models necessitates a forecasted understanding of human transitions within the landscape. The geospatial science domain has typically not looked forward through simulations. Advances in agent-based modeling, synthetic population generation, and GeoAI/GenAI are presenting new opportunities for generating future-oriented representations of humans landscapes, enabling the development of scenario-specific forecasted datasets, such as synthetic satellite imagery, land cover/land use, the built environment, and more. This session will explore the boundaries of geospatial modeling, data synthesis, and microsimulations for forecasting. Emphasis will be placed on research and studies that show how synthetic forecasted data can enable high fidelity assessments of climate futures and population impacts.

If this sounds of interest and you want to be part of this session, further details can be found at: https://agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/prelim.cgi/Session/229712

Key Thinkers on Space and Place


In the recent edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place edited by Mary GilmartinPhil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Sue Roberts, I was asked to write a chapter about Mike Batty

While I have known Mike for a while, to say writing the chapter was easy, is a understatement. In the sense, we had a word constraint (3,000 words plus references) and trying to sum up his biographical details and theoretical context, his spatial contributions along with his key advances and controversies, and key works was a challenge.  Anyway, if you would like to read a draft of my contribution to the book and my attempt to sum up Mikes work, you can find the reference and the link to the chapter below.

Full reference:  
Crooks, A.T. (2024), Michael Batty, in Gilmartin, M., Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Roberts, S. (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place (3rd edition), Sage, London, UK. pp. 37-43. (pdf)