As some readers might know, I been doing some work with Amit Patel and Naoru Koizumi on slums. To show some of this work we have organised a photo exhibation. If you are in the DC area feel free to pass by and say hello.

Not in Focus: Stories from Ahmedabad Slums

School of Public Policy, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and Arts Management Program at George Mason University are pleased to invite you to the Founders Art Gallery on:


Tuesday, October 1, 2013
5:30 - 7:30 pm
Founders Art Gallery, George Mason University, Arlington Campus
3351 Fairfax Dr, Arlington, VA 22201 (Click here for a map)

Featuring:
A photo exhibition that takes you inside the slums of Ahmedabad, India to experience challenges and indigenous solutions of citizens who are rarely in focus in the development process. (Exhibition will remain open through November 3, 2013). The photographs featured result from a research grant funded by NSF on slum formation in Ahmedabad, India, collaboratively carried out by George Mason University, CEPT University (India) and SAATH (India).

Screening of:
The Fourth World: A widely acclaimed documentary by Mark Volkers on individuals from slums around the world.
5:30 - 6:30 pm

Reception to follow
6:30 - 7:30 pm

This event is Free and Open to the Public. RSVP Here.

Contact Amit Patel at apatelh@gmu.edu for queries.

U.S. Synthetic Population Viewer

I have blogged before about a project that is creating a synthetic population for each household and person in the U.S. based on 2005-2009 ACS public use microdata and other data sources. Now one can view this information with an on-line viewer. Whats interesting about the viewer is that you can visually explore combinations of income, household size, and household age across the U.S. More information about the project can be found here, while the actual data can be downloaded from here.

Work featured in IQT Quarterly

Two of our recent papers have been  featured in IQT Quarterly. The first looks at completeness and error in VGI and the second features some of our work on social media and polycentric communities. The papers have been significantly shortened and edited and make easy reading (that's not to say the original papers were difficult to read :). For those not familiar with IQT Quarterly, it  is a publication from In-Q-Tel which: 

"was created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and emerging commercial innovation".

Full References:

Stefanidis, A., Cotnoir, A., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T., Radzikowski, J. and Rice, M. (2013), Demarcating New Boundaries: Mapping Virtual Polycentric Communities through Social Media Content, IQT Quarterly, 5 (2): 12-14. (pdf)

Jackson, S. P., Mullen W., Agouris, P., Crooks, A. T., Croitoru, A. and Stefanidis, A. (2013), Assessing Completeness and Spatial Error of Features in Volunteered Geographic Information, IQT Quarterly, 5 (2): 22-26. (pdf)

Land-use, livelihood strategies, and sustainability

People interested in exploring the connections between land-use, livelihood strategies, and sustainability should check out Nicholas Magliocca from the Agent-Based Virtual Labs blog who  has a new a paper entitled " Exploring Agricultural Livelihood Transitions with an Agent-Based Virtual Laboratory: Global Forces to Local Decision-Making" Not only does the paper show the strengths of using agent-based modeling for enriching our understanding of the relationships between agricultural intensity and population density but also highlights how a growing trend in sharing model code and utilizing the ODD protocol for documenting the model which can aid in understanding the model but also for model replication. Its only a shame more modelers don't do this.

Geosocial Gauge Paper

As regular readers of the blog know, we have been spending a lot of time recently looking at social media and the growth in locational information within such media. To this end we are very happy to see one of our papers appear in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. The paper is entitled "GeoSocial Gauge: A System Prototype for Knowledge Discovery from Social Media" which in essence discusses the challenge of merging diverse social media datasets into a single database which can then be used to generate geosocial knowledge. Below is the abstract:

"The remarkable success of online social media sites marks a shift in the way people connect and share information. Much of this information now contains some form of geographical content because of the proliferation of location-aware devices, thus fostering the emergence of geosocial media – a new type of user-generated geospatial information. Through geosocial media we are able, for the first time, to observe human activities in scales and resolutions that were so far unavailable. Furthermore, the wide spectrum of social media data and service types provides a multitude of perspectives on real-world activities and happenings, thus opening new frontiers in geosocial knowledge discovery. However, gleaning knowledge from geosocial media is a challenging task, as they tend to be unstructured and thematically diverse. To address these challenges, this article presents a system prototype for harvesting, processing, modeling, and integrating heterogeneous social media feeds towards the generation of geosocial knowledge. Our article addresses primarily two key components of this system prototype: a novel data model for heterogeneous social media feeds and a corresponding general system architecture. We present these key components and demonstrate their implementation in our system prototype, GeoSocial Gauge."

Full reference:

Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T., Radzikowski, J. and Stefanidis, A. (in press), GeoSocial Gauge: A System Prototype for Knowledge Discovery from Social Media, International Journal of Geographical Information Science. DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2013.825724 (pdf).

If you don't have access to IGIS, send us an email and we can send you an early version of the paper.