Latest Posts
GISRUK 2012 Presentations
Here are my two presentations from this years GISRUK conference, hosted by Lancaster University. Unfortunately both presentations included animations which slideshare can not cope with, so if you want to have the complete presentation experience you will have to use…
Continue reading »Natural Disasters and Crowdsourcing: Haiti
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>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;sssss&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</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……
Continue reading » Natural Disasters and Crowdsourcing: Haiti
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>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;sssss&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</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……
Continue reading » #Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System
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:
Continue reading »Crooks, A. T., Croitoru, A., Stefanidis, A. and Radzikowski, J. (acepted) “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System” Transactions in GIS.
#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System
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:
Continue reading »Crooks, A. T., Croitoru, A., Stefanidis, A. and Radzikowski, J. (acepted) “#Earthquake: Twitter as a Distributed Sensor System” Transactions in GIS.
The Twitter Languages of London
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 …
Continue reading »Smart Cities, Big Data
As a prelude to our Smart Cities conferences on April 20th, you can read a short editorial in Environment and Planning B (April 2012) that sketches the main issues. Click on the above picture and you will be taken to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »CASA’s Smart Cities Conference
Friday 20th April, 2012 at: Senate House,Malet Street,London,WC1E 7HU A free one day conference from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Find out about multimedia research on cities being carried out at CASA, with talks covering crowd-sourcing and participatory … Continue reading →
Continue reading »
Gamma After Life
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?
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.
Gamma After Life
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?
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.
Google Project Glass
Having recently made various presentations on the future of augmented reality, we have to say that the Google Glasses concept brings AR back into play:
With technology it always seems like one is waiting for the next big thing, but this takes it t…
Continue reading »BSPS Annual Conference 2012 – Call for Papers
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 […]
Continue reading »City portraits by Victor Enrich
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 …
Continue reading »
City portraits by Victor Enrich
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 »
City portraits by Victor Enrich
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 »
Mapped: London’s ‘Rudest’ Boroughs
A couple of weeks ago, I put up a post detailing how swearing on Twitter increases during the course of the average day. It seemed people get more angry and sweary outside of work time, rather than during.
To delve a little deeper in this topic…
Advanced Geo-Simulation Models
I wrote the Foreword for this eBook and I think it is Ok for me to let you read what I have written as the book is online. If you click on the image of the book cover above, then … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Cities of the Future: Towards Technical or Natural Optimisation?
Amanda Erickson put up a nice, simply visualisation of what life might be like in a future of driverless, automated cars. Check it out below.
Two things sprang to mind while watching this – first, how terrifying this might be for a passenger i…
Continue reading »CASA Smart Cities
[Updated x2] Just a note to say that I will be presenting some of my work, at the CASA Smart Cities free one-day conference. Over 200 tickets have already gone, but there are, at the time of writing, a few … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Stamen Design’s Watercolour Map
Stamen Design are a bespoke design and technology compa […]
Continue reading »Part 3: Agent Based Modelling – Turning an Image into space
The next assignment in the Visualization course of the MRes Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation in CASA, was relevant to “Agent based modelling”. In this project the idea is to create a tool which loads the pixels …
Continue reading »Part 3: Agent Based Modelling – Turning an Image into space
The next assignment in the Visualization course of the MRes Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation in CASA, was relevant to “Agent based modelling”. In this project the idea is to create a tool which loads the pixels …
Continue reading »Part 3: Agent Based Modelling – Turning an Image into space
The next assignment in the Visualization course of the MRes Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation in CASA, was relevant to “Agent based modelling”. In this project the idea is to create a tool which loads the pixels …
Continue reading »Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
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 …
Continue reading »Peter Hall’s 80th Birthday
The UK Government has just rediscovered Garden Cities, in time for Peter’s 80th Birthday. Amazing how you can use computers to bake a birthday cake with Ebenezer Howards immortal diagram as motif. We sampled the cake in Malcolm Grant’s Room … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Two Human Geography Lectureships at Loughborough University, UK
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 […]
Continue reading »If you ever wanted to test drive a spatial interaction model, here’s your chance…
TweetHello blog, we haven’t seen each other for a while – I’ve been meaning to call, but you know how it is, just been so busy with work and all that… What do you mean I only visit when I … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Catching up with the World – a Hub for the UK
The defining airport for the last few decades has to be sent into retirement. Heathrow is at its capacity limit and with a growth expectations of only 1.5% also at its expansion limits. It has however, influenced largely airports around the world and w…
Continue reading »Catching up with the World – a Hub for the UK
The defining airport for the last few decades has to be sent into retirement. Heathrow is at its capacity limit and with a growth expectations of only 1.5% also at its expansion limits. It has however, influenced largely airports around the world and w…
Continue reading »Student vis galore!
I blogged a few weeks ago about the students on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, and their take on twitter data collected by Fabian Neuhaus and Steven Gray. Since then they’ve been hard at work visualising bike … Continue reading →
London Blitz Map
The image above is a photo of part of a large map of Lo […]
Continue reading »Geospatial Science Seminar 20.03.2012
Visualization of traffic in space-time. Garavig Tanaksaranond, UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. To download a PDF of the seminar please click here. Abstract. Traffic congestion has many negative effects on people in the city. Although large amounts…
Continue reading »Geospatial Science Seminar 13.03.2012
A kernel based approach for spatio-temporal modelling and forecasting. James Haworth, UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. To download a PDF of the seminar please click here. Abstract. Traditionally, statistical models have been used for spatio-temporal forecasting due…
Continue reading »Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social
Carrying on the theme of new papers, we are pleased to announce the following publication:
Future Internet 2012, 4(1), 306-321; doi:10.3390/fi4010306
Article
Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social
Gerard Gogg…
Continue reading »Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social
Carrying on the theme of new papers, we are pleased to announce the following publication:
Future Internet 2012, 4(1), 306-321; doi:10.3390/fi4010306
Article
Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social
Gerard Gogg…
Continue reading »When does Twitter get angry?
I’ve been spending a bit of time with Twitter data of late – perhaps not a healthy activity – but it is amazing what a rich data source of social and spatial behaviour it is.
Someone asked to me today whether it was possible to identify when and wher…
Characteristics of Heavily Edited Objects in OpenStreetMap
As Editor of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903), an open access journal on Internet technologies and the information society, published by MDPI online we are pleased to announce the publication of the latest paper:
Character…
Continue reading »Characteristics of Heavily Edited Objects in OpenStreetMap
As Editor of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903), an open access journal on Internet technologies and the information society, published by MDPI online we are pleased to announce the publication of the latest paper:
Character…
Continue reading »Tuesday Teaser 20th March
This week, a politics question: Since WW2, how many British Prime Ministers first got the job without winning a general election? As ever, feel free to gloat and post answers and…
Continue reading »