Everything happens in space and time. From natural disasters to human catastrophes; from public health to energy sustainability; from urban growth to food security; 21st-century challenges call for a deep understanding of how the phenomena are linked in space and time. Solutions to these grand challenging issues require trailblazing new thinking, methodology and tools, integrating natural sciences, social sciences, earth sciences and biosciences.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry & University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) Program funded three universities to establish the I/UCRC for Spatiotemporal Thinking, Computing, and Applications in 2013 to research potential solutions to address such challenges. University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), George Mason University (Mason), and Harvard University each takes the leadership in thinking, computing and application respectively. Numerous government and industry sponsors are included as partners in the research. 

The center is targeted to build the national and international spatiotemporal infrastructure to advance a) human intelligence through spatiotemporal thinking, b) computer software and tools through spatiotemporal computing, and c) human capability of responding to deep scientific questions and grand engineering challenges through spatiotemporal applications.

Links:
Spatiotemporal Innovation Center

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With funding from the Sloan Foundation and Harvard Dataverse, the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) has developed a prototype spatio-temporal visualization platform dubbed “the BOP” (Billion Object Platform). The first goal of the BOP is to provide the Dataverse platform with an API-accessible big data exploration tool which can support streaming data. The more general goal is to lower barriers for scholars who wish to access large, streaming, spatio-temporal datasets by addressing a basic limitation of geospatial platforms when it comes to interactive visualization of more than a couple million features.

The first instance of the BOP is loaded with the latest billion geo-tweets, and is fed a real-time stream of about 1 million tweets per day. The geo-tweets are enriched with sentiment and census/admin boundary codes on their way into the system. The system is open source and is currently hosted on Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), an OpenStack environment with all components deployed in Docker orchestrated by Kontena. Here is an overview of the BOP architecture which is built on a stack consisting of Apache Lucene, Solr, Kafka, Zookeeper, Swagger, scikit-learn, OpenLayers, and AngularJS. 

To support the interactive visualization of billions of features the CGA added significant new capabilities to the widely used Solr and Lucene libraries in the form of spatial and temporal faceting.

The CGA has been harvesting geo-tweets since 2012 and has developed an archive which contains many billions of tweets.  If you are interested in learning more about this archive please contact us. 

Links:
Prototype BOP Demo
Presentation at Open Stack, May 2017
Presentation at International Workshop on Cloud Computing and Big Data
Presentation at Harvard ABCD-GIS
BOP Source Code

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InfoGroup’s Historical Business Backfile consists of geo-coded records of US businesses and other organizations that contain basic information on each entity, such as: contact information, industry description, annual revenues, number of employees, year established, and other data. Each annual file consists of a “snapshot” of InfoGroup’s data as of the last day of each year, creating a time series of data 1997-2016.

Access is restricted to current Harvard University community members. Use of Infogroup US Historical Business Data is subject to the terms and conditions of a license agreement (effective March 16, 2016) between Harvard and Infogroup Inc. and subject to applicable laws. 

Each data file is available in either .csv or .sas format. All data files are compressed into an archive in .gz, or GZIP, format. Extraction software such as 7-Zip is required to unzip these archives.

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Workshop on using GIS for Infectious Disease Modelling for Control Programs, taught to HSPH research scientists.

Download Workshop Materials.

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Title:  ”Building a Complex Surface to Simulate America’s Dry West”

Judges Comments:  ”Tackled a real and complex problem involving imaginative and functional understanding of environmental systems and spatial dynamics; built on existing knowledge and research; used sophisticated geospatial processing ; and documented  credible results in an elegant and readable poster.”  

View the award winning poster

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Title:  ”Vision Zero Boston: Using Crowd Sourced Safety Concerns to Identify Local Street Projects”

Judges Comments:  “Straight forward and effective GIS analysis; a clear narrative;  a timely and important topic visualized with effective maps and a  reasonable and evidence-based conclusion”

View the award winning poster

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This workshop will introduce the concept and various uses of the Global Positioning System (GPS). Students will use mapping GPS devices in the field, and upload the mapped data into desktop and internet mapping applications. Intended for students researchers who plan to use GPS for their field work. Note: This workshop includes time outside, so dress accordingly. Bring your own GPS unit, if you have one.

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Note: This date may change due to weather and/or other circumstances.

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Leader/Instructor: Giovanni Zambotti

Learn about the easy new tools Esri has created that take advantage of all the powerful mapping capabilities. ArcGIS Online and Esri Maps for MS Office give you the power of GIS without the learning curve. Do drag-and-drop mapping, geocoding, routing and visualizations outside of ArcGIS Desktop. Create interactive web maps you can embed in your own blog, web page or PowerPoint slide. Learn about Esri’s ready-to-use content. Find data, create a web map, and share it - all in about five minutes.

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Leader/Instructor: Giovanni Zambotti

Geoprocessing tasks can be time intensive since they often performed on a number of different and large datasets. This hand-on workshop will gently introduce Model Builder in ArcGIS Desktop, and show how you can use them to increase productivity and the quality of your data.

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