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First announcement: 7th International Conference on Population Geographies, Groningen, 25-28 June 2013

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TweetAfter six successful and pleasant previous International Conferences on Population Geographies in St Andrews (twice), Liverpool, Hong Kong, Dartmouth and Umea, the Population Research Centre of the University of Groningen is proud to present: The 7th International Conference on Population Geographies, Groningen, 25-28 June 2013 Note the dates in your agenda! Call for abstracts expected September 2012 […]

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Announcements/ News, Conferences

Conference – CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital

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CASA is running a one day conference under the title CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital. The title basically explains the aim of the event and besides a exciting line up of speakers with interesting projects there is also an exhibition with interactive installations.

Pigeon Sim
Image by Dr George MacKerron / Pigeon Sim, how to navigate the flight icons.

As the Keynote speaker Professor Carlo Ratti, Director, Senseable City Lab, MIT is invited. Other speakers include: Professor Michael Batty, Chairman, CASA, Professor of Planning; Dr Andy Hudson-Smith, Director and Head of Department, CASA; CASA researchers including Richard Milton, Oliver O’Brien, Dr James Cheshire, Steven Gray, Dr George MacKerron, Dr Jon Reades, Dr Joan Serras and Dr Duncan Smith

Pigeon Sim
Image by CASA / Conference flyer.

This event is supported by CASA research grants: ANALOGIES (EPSRC), COSMIC (ERA-NET), GENeSIS (ESRC) and TALISMAN (ESRC, NCRM).

The four main aspects of the conference are:
Find out about groundbreaking research being carried out at CASA, with talks covering crowd-sourcing and participatory mapping, sensing using social media and experience sampling, data dashboards, public transport, public bike schemes and more. Explore a brand new interactive exhibition, showcasing some of CASA’s latest models and maps. Meet and network with academic, public and private sector attendees during coffee breaks, a catered lunch, and an evening drinks reception. Find out more about the courses we offer at CASA.

The Programm can be found HERE. Registration is on http://casasmartcities.eventbrite.co.uk/. The Twitter hashtag for this conference is #casaconf.

The exhibition part will include some exciting experimental interactive media installations. In Pigeon Sim the visitor can fly around Google Earth, navigating by flapping the arms, there are simulations running interactively on touch tables and also the live London Dashboard installation is on display.

NCL_3DPhModel02
Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

Some of the Twitter work is on display too. The analogue Tweet-O-Meter, last on show at the British Library will be installed and a a 3D physical model of the London New City Landscape map will be on display. This model was layered from the contour lines and includes the labels and tag. With it some of the aNCL network clips will be on display, showing the connective aspects of the data. In these clips other cities than London will also be on show to extend on the perspective.

NCL_3DPhModel01
Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

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Conference, tweetography

Conference – CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital

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CASA is running a one day conference under the title CASA Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital. The title basically explains the aim of the event and besides a exciting line up of speakers with interesting projects there is also an exhibition with interactive installations.

Pigeon Sim
Image by Dr George MacKerron / Pigeon Sim, how to navigate the flight icons.

As the Keynote speaker Professor Carlo Ratti, Director, Senseable City Lab, MIT is invited. Other speakers include: Professor Michael Batty, Chairman, CASA, Professor of Planning; Dr Andy Hudson-Smith, Director and Head of Department, CASA; CASA researchers including Richard Milton, Oliver O’Brien, Dr James Cheshire, Steven Gray, Dr George MacKerron, Dr Jon Reades, Dr Joan Serras and Dr Duncan Smith

Pigeon Sim
Image by CASA / Conference flyer.

This event is supported by CASA research grants: ANALOGIES (EPSRC), COSMIC (ERA-NET), GENeSIS (ESRC) and TALISMAN (ESRC, NCRM).

The four main aspects of the conference are:
Find out about groundbreaking research being carried out at CASA, with talks covering crowd-sourcing and participatory mapping, sensing using social media and experience sampling, data dashboards, public transport, public bike schemes and more. Explore a brand new interactive exhibition, showcasing some of CASA’s latest models and maps. Meet and network with academic, public and private sector attendees during coffee breaks, a catered lunch, and an evening drinks reception. Find out more about the courses we offer at CASA.

The Programm can be found HERE. Registration is on http://casasmartcities.eventbrite.co.uk/. The Twitter hashtag for this conference is #casaconf.

The exhibition part will include some exciting experimental interactive media installations. In Pigeon Sim the visitor can fly around Google Earth, navigating by flapping the arms, there are simulations running interactively on touch tables and also the live London Dashboard installation is on display.

NCL_3DPhModel02
Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

Some of the Twitter work is on display too. The analogue Tweet-O-Meter, last on show at the British Library will be installed and a a 3D physical model of the London New City Landscape map will be on display. This model was layered from the contour lines and includes the labels and tag. With it some of the aNCL network clips will be on display, showing the connective aspects of the data. In these clips other cities than London will also be on show to extend on the perspective.

NCL_3DPhModel01
Image by urbanTick for NCL / The 3D London NCL model.

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Conference, tweetography

Natural Disasters and Crowdsourcing: Haiti

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Natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis occur all over the world, altering the physical landscape and often severely disrupting people’s daily lives. Recently researchers’ attention has focused on using crowds of volunteers to help map the infrastructure and devastation caused by natural disasters, such as those in Haiti and Pakistan. For example, in the movie below shows the response to the earthquake by the OpenStreetMap community within 12 hours of the earthquake. The white flashes indicate edits to the map (often by tracing satellite/aerial photography).
While this data is extremely useful, as it is allows us to assess damage and thus aid the distribution of relief, but it tells us little about how the people in such areas will react to the devastation, the supply of food, or the reconstruction. To address this, we are exploring how agent-based modeling can be used to explore peoples reactions. To do this we have created a prototype spatially explicit agent-based model, created using crowdsourced geographic information and other sources of publicly available data, which can be used to study the aftermath of a catastrophic event. The specific case modeled here is the Haiti earthquake of January 2010. Crowdsourced data is used to build the initial populations of people affected by the event, to construct their environment, and to set their needs based on the damage to buildings. 

The idea behind the model is to explore how people react to the distribution of aid, as well as how rumors propagating through the population and crowding around aid distribution points might lead to food riots and similar social phenomena. Such a model could potentially provide a link between socio-cultural information of the people affected and relevant humanitarian relief organizations.

<p><p>sssss</p></p>

The animation above shows one simulation run where there is the spread of  information and agent movement (red dots) around one center (blue dot). While the chart below shows how over time the density of agents around the food station increases over time.

The idea behind such a model is one can take crowdsourced information and fuse it into an agent-based model and see how people will react to the distribution of food centers. For example, the movie below shows how agents find out about four (hypothetical) different food centers and decide whether or not to go to them in a 6 by 8km area of Port-au-Prince.

Spread of information and agent movement (red dots) in a 6 by 8km area of Port-au-Prince.
More details about this model to come……
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ABM, Crowdsourcing, GIS, VGI

Natural Disasters and Crowdsourcing: Haiti

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Natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis occur all over the world, altering the physical landscape and often severely disrupting people’s daily lives. Recently researchers’ attention has focused on using crowds of volunteers to help map the infrastructure and devastation caused by natural disasters, such as those in Haiti and Pakistan. For example, in the movie below shows the response to the earthquake by the OpenStreetMap community within 12 hours of the earthquake. The white flashes indicate edits to the map (often by tracing satellite/aerial photography).
While this data is extremely useful, as it is allows us to assess damage and thus aid the distribution of relief, but it tells us little about how the people in such areas will react to the devastation, the supply of food, or the reconstruction. To address this, we are exploring how agent-based modeling can be used to explore peoples reactions. To do this we have created a prototype spatially explicit agent-based model, created using crowdsourced geographic information and other sources of publicly available data, which can be used to study the aftermath of a catastrophic event. The specific case modeled here is the Haiti earthquake of January 2010. Crowdsourced data is used to build the initial populations of people affected by the event, to construct their environment, and to set their needs based on the damage to buildings. 

The idea behind the model is to explore how people react to the distribution of aid, as well as how rumors propagating through the population and crowding around aid distribution points might lead to food riots and similar social phenomena. Such a model could potentially provide a link between socio-cultural information of the people affected and relevant humanitarian relief organizations.

<p><p>sssss</p></p>

The animation above shows one simulation run where there is the spread of  information and agent movement (red dots) around one center (blue dot). While the chart below shows how over time the density of agents around the food station increases over time.

The idea behind such a model is one can take crowdsourced information and fuse it into an agent-based model and see how people will react to the distribution of food centers. For example, the movie below shows how agents find out about four (hypothetical) different food centers and decide whether or not to go to them in a 6 by 8km area of Port-au-Prince.

Spread of information and agent movement (red dots) in a 6 by 8km area of Port-au-Prince.
More details about this model to come……
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ABM, Crowdsourcing, GIS, VGI

#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System

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Our work on using social media continues to develop and we have recently had a paper accepted in Transactions in GIS, entitled “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System“. Below we present our abstract and some of the results.

Social media feeds are rapidly emerging as a novel avenue for the contribution and dissemination of information that is often geographic. Their content often includes references to events occurring at, or affecting specific locations. Within this paper we analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the twitter feed activity responding to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred on the East Coast of the United States (US) on August 23, 2011. We argue that these feeds represent a hybrid form of a sensor system that allows for the identification and localization of the impact area of the event. By contrasting this to comparable content collected through the dedicated crowdsourcing ‘Did You Feel It?’ (DYFI) website of the US Geological Survey we assess the potential of the use of harvested social media content for event monitoring. The experiments support the notion that people act as sensors to give us comparable results in a timely manner, and can complement other sources of data to enhance our situational awareness and improve our understanding and response to such events.

The movie below show geolocated tweets with references to the earthquake through keyword (earthquake or earth and quake) and hashtag search (#earthquake or #quake) for the first hour after the earthquake.

The following images give a glimpse at some of our analysis.

Response pattern as function of distance from epicenter for the first 400 seconds after the earthquake. At the top we see a plot of (reaction time, distance) of all tweets during that period. At the bottom we show the histogram of the number of tweets as a function of distance.
Locations of the 40 tweets in the shaded area of the figure above overlaid over the USGS CDI scale map. Tweet locations are marked as green circles. Color-coding in the graph is ranging from red (high perceived intensity) to yellow (lower perceived intensity). The dashed line shows a distance of approximately 950 km (8.5 degrees of angular distance) from the epicenter.

The movie below gives you an idea of some of the tweet content:

Full reference to this paper is:

Crooks, A. T.,  Croitoru, A.,  Stefanidis, A. and Radzikowski, J. (acepted) “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System” Transactions in GIS.

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AGI, twitter, VGI

#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System

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Our work on using social media continues to develop and we have recently had a paper accepted in Transactions in GIS, entitled “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System“. Below we present our abstract and some of the results.

Social media feeds are rapidly emerging as a novel avenue for the contribution and dissemination of information that is often geographic. Their content often includes references to events occurring at, or affecting specific locations. Within this paper we analyze the spatial and temporal characteristics of the twitter feed activity responding to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred on the East Coast of the United States (US) on August 23, 2011. We argue that these feeds represent a hybrid form of a sensor system that allows for the identification and localization of the impact area of the event. By contrasting this to comparable content collected through the dedicated crowdsourcing ‘Did You Feel It?’ (DYFI) website of the US Geological Survey we assess the potential of the use of harvested social media content for event monitoring. The experiments support the notion that people act as sensors to give us comparable results in a timely manner, and can complement other sources of data to enhance our situational awareness and improve our understanding and response to such events.

The movie below show geolocated tweets with references to the earthquake through keyword (earthquake or earth and quake) and hashtag search (#earthquake or #quake) for the first hour after the earthquake.

The following images give a glimpse at some of our analysis.

Response pattern as function of distance from epicenter for the first 400 seconds after the earthquake. At the top we see a plot of (reaction time, distance) of all tweets during that period. At the bottom we show the histogram of the number of tweets as a function of distance.
Locations of the 40 tweets in the shaded area of the figure above overlaid over the USGS CDI scale map. Tweet locations are marked as green circles. Color-coding in the graph is ranging from red (high perceived intensity) to yellow (lower perceived intensity). The dashed line shows a distance of approximately 950 km (8.5 degrees of angular distance) from the epicenter.

The movie below gives you an idea of some of the tweet content:

Full reference to this paper is:

Crooks, A. T.,  Croitoru, A.,  Stefanidis, A. and Radzikowski, J. (acepted) “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System” Transactions in GIS.

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AGI, twitter, VGI

The Twitter Languages of London

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Last year Eric Fischer produced a great map (see below) visualising the language communities of Twitter. The map, perhaps unsurprisingly, closely matches the geographic extents of the world’s major linguistic groups. On seeing these broad patterns I wondered how well they applied to the international communities living in London. The graphic above shows the spatial …

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dataviz, Featured Maps, language, london, twitter, visualisation

Gamma After Life

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What kind of nuclear future awaits us? The recent discussion on the next generation of nuclear power has ebbed away much too quickly. However especially in the UK a public discussion would be much needed with the current plants becoming out of date and a urgent requirement to either decommission them and replace or refurbish to keep going.

The afterlife of nuclear power, being it military or civil usage is however, a much undiscussed topic. It is a field of uncertainties and projections. A whole range of interesting problems are associated with it, not the least the dramatic time span it covers. See also a post on http://urbantick.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/message-to-future.html. How to plan for 10’000 years?

Gamma
Image by Factory Fifteen taken from architizer taken from Dezeen / A vision of the post nuclear city.

Many futures are possible and Factory Fifteen has produced a short on their vision, quite a disturbing one but amazingly produced, mixing some CGI and real footage.

The Synopsis of the film in short: In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the cities back into civilisation. GAMMA sets out to stabilise the atomic mistakes of yesteryear for the re-inhabitation of future generations. Using its patented ‘Nuke-Root’ technology; part fungi, part mollusc, GAMMA intends to soak up the radiation and remove it from the irradiated cities, rebuilding them in the process.
Setting out from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, GAMMA launches its RIG_01 BETA and heads east to the iconic disaster sites of 1980’s USSR. The film follows a group of researchers investigating GAMMA’s practice from launch to deployment. Moving through a trail of unsuccessful ships across the desert, we follow the researchers from Aralsk’s littered sea bed east to the Ukraine.

GAMMA begins its quest of nuclear stability in the Ukraine; Pripyat is used as a test bed for the deployment of GAMMA’s patented ‘Nuke-root’ organisms. Intended to soak up the radiation, the roots infiltrate the ground and built structures to absorb the ‘nuclear nasty’s’. As with many urban developers, GAMMA’s execution is cheap and ineffective. The city is in turn rendered more radioactive, broken and uninhabitable than before, only now with an outbreak of growing ‘Nuke-roots’. The film follows the researchers through the ruins of the 70’s utopia, moving across a whole city that consists solely of desolation and total abandon, the researchers witness the aftermath of GAMMA’s almighty cock-up.

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city, future, nuclear

Gamma After Life

Posted on by

What kind of nuclear future awaits us? The recent discussion on the next generation of nuclear power has ebbed away much too quickly. However especially in the UK a public discussion would be much needed with the current plants becoming out of date and a urgent requirement to either decommission them and replace or refurbish to keep going.

The afterlife of nuclear power, being it military or civil usage is however, a much undiscussed topic. It is a field of uncertainties and projections. A whole range of interesting problems are associated with it, not the least the dramatic time span it covers. See also a post on http://urbantick.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/message-to-future.html. How to plan for 10’000 years?

Gamma
Image by Factory Fifteen taken from architizer taken from Dezeen / A vision of the post nuclear city.

Many futures are possible and Factory Fifteen has produced a short on their vision, quite a disturbing one but amazingly produced, mixing some CGI and real footage.

The Synopsis of the film in short: In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the cities back into civilisation. GAMMA sets out to stabilise the atomic mistakes of yesteryear for the re-inhabitation of future generations. Using its patented ‘Nuke-Root’ technology; part fungi, part mollusc, GAMMA intends to soak up the radiation and remove it from the irradiated cities, rebuilding them in the process.
Setting out from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, GAMMA launches its RIG_01 BETA and heads east to the iconic disaster sites of 1980’s USSR. The film follows a group of researchers investigating GAMMA’s practice from launch to deployment. Moving through a trail of unsuccessful ships across the desert, we follow the researchers from Aralsk’s littered sea bed east to the Ukraine.

GAMMA begins its quest of nuclear stability in the Ukraine; Pripyat is used as a test bed for the deployment of GAMMA’s patented ‘Nuke-root’ organisms. Intended to soak up the radiation, the roots infiltrate the ground and built structures to absorb the ‘nuclear nasty’s’. As with many urban developers, GAMMA’s execution is cheap and ineffective. The city is in turn rendered more radioactive, broken and uninhabitable than before, only now with an outbreak of growing ‘Nuke-roots’. The film follows the researchers through the ruins of the 70’s utopia, moving across a whole city that consists solely of desolation and total abandon, the researchers witness the aftermath of GAMMA’s almighty cock-up.

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city, future, nuclear

BSPS Annual Conference 2012 – Call for Papers

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TweetBSPS Annual Conference 2012  Monday 10 – Wednesday 12 September 2012, The University of Nottingham  SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS: DEADLINE 11th May 2012. The 2012 BSPS Conference will be held at the University of Nottingham from 10-12 September. All Conference sessions will be held on site, where Conference catering and accommodation will also be available […]

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Announcements/ News, Conferences, Events

City portraits by Victor Enrich

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There is something fascinating in visualizing sentences. “Don’t talk about it, picture it”. Spanish artist Victor Enrich creates surreal city portraits. Images that resemble virtual landscapes, but with a touch of criticism that derives from capturing extremely intimate urban surroundings and manipulating them as he would do in a virtual environment. There is a little bit of magic in combining everyday architectural pictures with virtual ideas. Cities with a road that leads to the sky, a building that looks like a gun.. I particularly like the stranded urban block of flats and the stairs of the plaza hotel, that somehow lost their way to the top of the building and continued duplicating forward:

click to view images
Read more »

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Virtual Worlds, Visual Art

City portraits by Victor Enrich

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There is something fascinating in visualizing sentences. “Don’t talk about it, picture it”. Spanish artist Victor Enrich creates surreal city portraits. Images that resemble virtual landscapes, but with a touch of criticism that derives from capturing extremely intimate urban surroundings and manipulating them as he would do in a virtual environment. There is a little bit of magic in combining everyday architectural pictures with virtual ideas. Cities with a road that leads to the sky, a building that looks like a gun.. I particularly like the stranded urban block of flats and the stairs of the plaza hotel, that somehow lost their way to the top of the building and continued duplicating forward:

click to view images
Read more »

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Virtual Worlds, Visual Art

Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800

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I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850. The creation of this dataset was completed as part of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project. The routes are plotted from the …

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Featured Maps, ggplot2, map, Maps, maptools, R, R Spatial Tips, visualisation

Two Human Geography Lectureships at Loughborough University, UK

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TweetPosts available from 1st September 2012; closing date 27 April 2012; salary range £32,900 to £44,165.  The Department of Geography, which sits within the School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences, seeks to appoint two lecturers in human geography from 1st September 2012.  These posts are offered on standard open-ended contracts; they are not fixed-term […]

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Jobs
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