The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
In the past I have blogged on how one can use Repast Simphony to get agents to move around a network, which also inspired a similar model in GeoMason (see here for the movie). Keeping with this theme Yang has recently finished a NetLogo model whe…
Continue reading »In the past I have blogged on how one can use Repast Simphony to get agents to move around a network, which also inspired a similar model in GeoMason (see here for the movie). Keeping with this theme Yang has recently finished a NetLogo model whe…
Continue reading »The winter edition of Esri ArcNews (which according to Mike Gould of Esri, is printed in as many copies as Forbes) includes an article on the activities of the Extreme Citizen Science group in supporting indigenous groups in mapping. The article highlights the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) aspects of the work, and mentioning many members of … Continue reading Extreme Citizen Science in Esri ArcNews
We’ve featured Crossrail’s official construction map before, when it was showing the progress of the various TBMs (tunnel boring machines) drilling through London, but with the tunnels themselves now burrowed, it’s received a welcome update – if you zoom right in, you can now see the shape and extent of the underground stations. And they […]
Continue reading »CityMetric |
Bored? Here are some century-old maps of Britain to play with
CityMetric Finally, our map of the week – which, I’ll be honest, we do no justice to whatsoever – is this magnificent piece of work by Duncan Smith of UCL’s Centre for Advanced spatial Analysis. It shows, at a glance, the growth of all the world’s major cities … |
Every project ends, eventually. The Citizen Cyberlab project was funded through the seventh framework programme of the European Union (or EU FP7 in short), and run from September 2012 to November 2015. Today marks the final review of the project in with all the project’s partners presenting the work that they’ve done during the project. The project had … Continue reading Citizen Cyberlab – notes from final review (26-27 January, Geneva)
Recently, Alison Heppenstall, Nick Malleson and myself have just had a paper accepted in Systems entitled: “Space, the Final Frontier”: How Good are Agent-Based Models at Simulating Individuals and Space in Cities?” In the paper we critically examine how well agent-based models have simulated a variety of urban processes. We discus what considerations are needed when choosing the appropriate level of spatial analysis and time frame to model urban phenomena and what role Big Data can play in agent-based modeling. Below you can read the abstract of the paper and see a number of example applications discussed.
Abstract: Cities are complex systems, comprising of many interacting parts. How we simulate and understand causality in urban systems is continually evolving. Over the last decade the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm has provided a new lens for understanding the effects of interactions of individuals and how through such interactions macro structures emerge, both in the social and physical environment of cities. However, such a paradigm has been hindered due to computational power and a lack of large fine scale datasets. Within the last few years we have witnessed a massive increase in computational processing power and storage, combined with the onset of Big Data. Today geographers find themselves in a data rich era. We now have access to a variety of data sources (e.g., social media, mobile phone data, etc.) that tells us how, and when, individuals are using urban spaces. These data raise several questions: can we effectively use them to understand and model cities as complex entities? How well have ABM approaches lent themselves to simulating the dynamics of urban processes? What has been, or will be, the influence of Big Data on increasing our ability to understand and simulate cities? What is the appropriate level of spatial analysis and time frame to model urban phenomena? Within this paper we discuss these questions using several examples of ABM applied to urban geography to begin a dialogue about the utility of ABM for urban modeling. The arguments that the paper raises are applicable across the wider research environment where researchers are considering using this approach.
Keywords: cities; agent-based modeling; big data; crime; retail; space; simulation
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| Figure 1. (A) System structure; (B) System hierarchy; and (C) Related subsystems/processes (adapted from Batty, 2013). |
Reference cited:
Batty, M. (2013). The New Science of Cities; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA.
Full reference to the open access paper:
Heppenstall, A., Malleson, N. and Crooks A.T. (2016). “Space, the Final Frontier”: How Good are Agent-based Models at Simulating Individuals and Space in Cities?, Systems, 4(1), 9; doi: 10.3390/systems4010009 (pdf)
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Recently, Alison Heppenstall, Nick Malleson and myself have just had a paper accepted in Systems entitled: “Space, the Final Frontier”: How Good are Agent-Based Models at Simulating Individuals and Space in Cities?” In the paper we critically examine how well agent-based models have simulated a variety of urban processes. We discus what considerations are needed when choosing the appropriate level of spatial analysis and time frame to model urban phenomena and what role Big Data can play in agent-based modeling. Below you can read the abstract of the paper and see a number of example applications discussed.
Abstract: Cities are complex systems, comprising of many interacting parts. How we simulate and understand causality in urban systems is continually evolving. Over the last decade the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm has provided a new lens for understanding the effects of interactions of individuals and how through such interactions macro structures emerge, both in the social and physical environment of cities. However, such a paradigm has been hindered due to computational power and a lack of large fine scale datasets. Within the last few years we have witnessed a massive increase in computational processing power and storage, combined with the onset of Big Data. Today geographers find themselves in a data rich era. We now have access to a variety of data sources (e.g., social media, mobile phone data, etc.) that tells us how, and when, individuals are using urban spaces. These data raise several questions: can we effectively use them to understand and model cities as complex entities? How well have ABM approaches lent themselves to simulating the dynamics of urban processes? What has been, or will be, the influence of Big Data on increasing our ability to understand and simulate cities? What is the appropriate level of spatial analysis and time frame to model urban phenomena? Within this paper we discuss these questions using several examples of ABM applied to urban geography to begin a dialogue about the utility of ABM for urban modeling. The arguments that the paper raises are applicable across the wider research environment where researchers are considering using this approach.
Keywords: cities; agent-based modeling; big data; crime; retail; space; simulation
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| Figure 1. (A) System structure; (B) System hierarchy; and (C) Related subsystems/processes (adapted from Batty, 2013). |
Reference cited:
Batty, M. (2013). The New Science of Cities; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA.
Full reference to the open access paper:
Heppenstall, A., Malleson, N. and Crooks A.T. (2016). “Space, the Final Frontier”: How Good are Agent-based Models at Simulating Individuals and Space in Cities?, Systems, 4(1), 9; doi: 10.3390/systems4010009 (pdf)
Continue reading »
So London’s myriad of suburban commuter rail services, many of which are south of the River Thames and so act as the equivalent of the largely north-of-the-river tube network, may in the future come under the control of Transport for London, the main transit authority for the city. It makes a lot of sense – […]
Continue reading »In CASA, in a project lead by Clementine Cottineau, we are working how economic and social attributes of cities scale with size. This is one of our longstanding foci in our ERC Mechanicity Work and it will also be central … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Borchert Lecture | Master of Geographic Information Science | College of Liberal Arts UMN News
Continue reading »The GIScience Research Group (GIScRG) is sponsoring a number of sessions at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2016, London – 30 August to 2 September 2016. Urban Analytics GeoComputation; The Next Twenty Years The City Information Nexus: Modelling The Future City Learning Gis: Establishing The Nexus Between Disciplines Methods For Assessing Resilience And … Continue reading GIScRG Sponsored Sessions 2016 →
Lumiere London is a festival of light and art taking place every evening until this Sunday. From 6:30-10pm, nearly 30 temporary artworks in central London will come alive with lights. From a holographic elephant to neon sausage-dogs and a strange organic-looking structure suspended over London’s principal crossroads (Oxford Circus), it’s a great excuse to brave […]
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The idea for an ‘empathy hat’ was born after a discussion about how comfortable people would be to show how they are really feeling. How open do we want to be about our feelings? Facial expressions are easy to regulate and so are words, but physiological reactions are less easy to […]
The post Wearing your heart on your head appeared first on CEDE.
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In the weeks leading up to Christmas, we replaced the hardware that was running the digital 4Candles prayer system in St Michael’s church in Hawkshead. One of the reasons for the system upgrade was to attempt to improve and/or deal with poor network connectivity that the system relies so heavily […]
The post 4Candles Prayer system upgrade at St Michael’s church in Hawkshead appeared first on CEDE.
Continue reading »The increasingly availability of bandwidth along with advances in computer hardware and Internet services is making it possible to stream HD content, live from multiple…
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Here’s a map of the top method of travel to work, for people aged 16-74 and in employment, at the time of the 2011 Census: The pattern is, fairly evenly, that car use (light blue) dominates except for people living in the very centre of cities, where walking to work (green) is the most popular … Continue reading What if There Were No Cars? →
Continue reading »My current editorial in Environment and Planning B tracks the massive investments in infrastructure in China which have taken place since the Great Recession of 2007-2008. One of the key features of contemporary economic systems is their volatility with respect … Continue reading →
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1st International Conference on Geographies of Migration and Mobility (iMigMob)
Loughborough University, UK
18th-20th July 2016 (last booking date 1st July)
See here for event information.
TweetThe Hull York Medical School, UK, invites application for a fully funded PhD studentship in applied health research How healthy are older migrants? Health between migrants and the local population often differs in that migrants frequently have a health advantage over the resident population when they first enter a country. This so called healthy migrant […]
Continue reading »Our paper on London’s street network has been picked up by various blogs and tweeted as well by Steve Strogatz. The paper “Multifractal to monofractal evolution of the London street network” by Roberto Murcio, Paolo Masucci, Elsa Arcaute, and myself (Michael Batty) … Continue reading →
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The Valuation Office Agency publish some interesting open data sets from time-to-time. One that caught my eye recently was a breakdown of counts of residential buildings in each small area (LSOA, around 700 houses) by the decade that they were built in. The data is not perfect for mapping – pre-1900 is grouped together into […]
Continue reading »Tweet Please follow this link to find details of a job opportunity based at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. The post is for a Research Assistant to work on an ESRC-funded project examining young adults’ housing transitions. The closing date for applications is January 31st 2016.
Continue reading »TweetPlease follow this link to find details of a job opportunity based at the University of South Wales. The main purpose of the job is to undertake work deriving small area estimates of social capital in Wales as part of the WISERD research programme…
Continue reading »Under the leadership of Roger Fradera of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, I was involved as a co-author on a ‘thinkpiece’ about citizen science and the nexus. If you haven’t come across the term, ‘nexus’ is the linkage of food, energy, water and the environment as a major challenge for the future. The paper is … Continue reading New publication: Citizen Science and the Nexus (water, energy, food, population)
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| A summary of our approach |
Background: The emergence of social media is providing an alternative avenue for information exchange and opinion formation on health-related issues. Collective discourse in such media leads to the formation of a complex narrative, conveying public views and perceptions.
Objective: This paper presents a study of Twitter narrative regarding vaccination in the aftermath of the 2015 measles outbreak, both in terms of its cyber and physical characteristics. The contributions of this work are the analysis of the data for this particular study, as well as presenting a quantitative interdisciplinary approach to analyze such open-source data in the context of health narratives.
Methods: 669,136 tweets were collected in the period February 1 through March 9, 2015 referring to vaccination. These tweets were analyzed to identify key terms, connections among such terms, retweet patterns, the structure of the narrative, and connections to the geographical space.
Results: The data analysis captures the anatomy of the themes and relations that make up the discussion about vaccination in Twitter. The results highlight the higher impact of stories contributed by news organizations compared to direct tweets by health organizations in communicating health-related information. They also capture the structure of the anti-vaccination narrative and its terms of reference. Analysis also revealed the relationship between community engagement in Twitter and state policies regarding child vaccination. Residents of Vermont and Oregon, the two states with the highest rates of non-medical exemption from school-entry vaccines nationwide, are leading the social media discussion in terms of participation.
Conclusions: The interdisciplinary study of health-related debates in social media across the cyber-physical debate nexus leads to a greater understanding of public concerns, views, and responses to health-related issues. Further coalescing such capabilities shows promise towards advancing health communication, supporting the design of more effective strategies that take into account the complex and evolving public views of health issues.
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| Global distribution of tweets in our data corpus |
Radzikowski, J., Stefanidis, A., Jacobsen K.H., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T. and Delamater, P.L. (2016). “The Measles Vaccination Narrative in Twitter: A Quantitative Analysis”, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2(1):e1.
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| Hashtag associations: clustering based on co-occurrences of hashtags in individual tweets |
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| A summary of our approach |
Background: The emergence of social media is providing an alternative avenue for information exchange and opinion formation on health-related issues. Collective discourse in such media leads to the formation of a complex narrative, conveying public views and perceptions.
Objective: This paper presents a study of Twitter narrative regarding vaccination in the aftermath of the 2015 measles outbreak, both in terms of its cyber and physical characteristics. The contributions of this work are the analysis of the data for this particular study, as well as presenting a quantitative interdisciplinary approach to analyze such open-source data in the context of health narratives.
Methods: 669,136 tweets were collected in the period February 1 through March 9, 2015 referring to vaccination. These tweets were analyzed to identify key terms, connections among such terms, retweet patterns, the structure of the narrative, and connections to the geographical space.
Results: The data analysis captures the anatomy of the themes and relations that make up the discussion about vaccination in Twitter. The results highlight the higher impact of stories contributed by news organizations compared to direct tweets by health organizations in communicating health-related information. They also capture the structure of the anti-vaccination narrative and its terms of reference. Analysis also revealed the relationship between community engagement in Twitter and state policies regarding child vaccination. Residents of Vermont and Oregon, the two states with the highest rates of non-medical exemption from school-entry vaccines nationwide, are leading the social media discussion in terms of participation.
Conclusions: The interdisciplinary study of health-related debates in social media across the cyber-physical debate nexus leads to a greater understanding of public concerns, views, and responses to health-related issues. Further coalescing such capabilities shows promise towards advancing health communication, supporting the design of more effective strategies that take into account the complex and evolving public views of health issues.
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| Global distribution of tweets in our data corpus |
Radzikowski, J., Stefanidis, A., Jacobsen K.H., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T. and Delamater, P.L. (2016). “The Measles Vaccination Narrative in Twitter: A Quantitative Analysis”, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 2(1):e1.
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| Hashtag associations: clustering based on co-occurrences of hashtags in individual tweets |
State of Mind (Blog) |
La matematica dell’amore: quante probabilità abbiamo di incontrare l’anima gemella?
State of Mind (Blog) Cercando di renderla semplice, nel suo libro “La matematica dell’amore” Hannah Fry, docente all’UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis di Londra, esemplifica la cosa così. Mettiamo che a una festa ci siano 3 ragazzi e 3 ragazze, e che siano tutti … |
State of Mind (Blog) |
L’amore matematico: quante probabilità abbiamo di incontrare l’amore?
State of Mind (Blog) Cercando di renderla semplice, nel suo libro “La matematica dell’amore” Hannah Fry, docente all’UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis di Londra, esemplifica la cosa così. Mettiamo che a una festa ci siano 3 ragazzi e 3 ragazze, e che siano tutti … |
Robin Edwards and myself have improved our visualisation of city size and rank over time and this is now published as a featured graphic in Environment and Planning A in their forthcoming material. It is quite hard to represent three variables in a two-dimensional … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The notion that cities produce ideas goes back to the time when cities first emerged from our nomadic existence. Indeed it appears that human ‘progress’ through development is centred around the production of new ideas or at least the evolution of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »7 great leadership lessons I learned this year Business Insider Australia
Continue reading »For the last few years one of the classes that I have given is the Introduction to Computational Social Science (CSS). This is often the first class many students take within our program and as such its objectives are:To understand the motivation for t…
Continue reading »For the last few years one of the classes that I have given is the Introduction to Computational Social Science (CSS). This is often the first class many students take within our program and as such its objectives are:To understand the motivation for t…
Continue reading »Business Insider Australia7 great leadership lessons I learned this yearBusiness Insider AustraliaFor many leaders, the end of the year represents a time to reflect and reset expectations for the year ahead. Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich, for instance, t…
Continue reading »Business Insider |
7 brilliant leadership lessons I learned this year
Business Insider Hannah Fry, a mathematician at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in London and author of “The Mathematics of Love”, says exploiting the Gale-Shapley matching algorithm can help you hire the best possible candidates. Essentially, the … |
We don’t have open individual building age data in the UK, unlike in some other countries (the data has been used to great effect in New York City and Amsterdam) but the Valuation Office Agency, which amongst other things decides council tax bandings for residential properties in England and Wales, has published some interesting data … Continue reading The Age of Buildings →
Continue reading »7 brilliant leadership lessons I learned this year – Business Insider Business Insider
Continue reading »7 brilliant leadership lessons I learned this year Business InsiderSecrets to hiring, being a great boss, and achieving your goals.
Continue reading »7 brilliant leadership lessons I learned this year Business InsiderSecrets to hiring, being a great boss, and achieving your goals.
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