An introduction to spatial analysis for various kinds of problem solving in a GIS environment. Examples of both raster and vector data-based spatial operations like overlay, buffering, and interpolation will be covered.

• Download Workshop Materials

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ESRI Product Update for Business Analyst for Desktop using Esri U.S. Data Bundle with Market Potential Index (MPI) data. (13 Dec 2017)

ESRI is proactively reaching out to alert customers of a recently-discovered issue with the MPI data that may impact some of your workflows with Business Analyst.

* PATCH TO FIX THIS ISSUE (Dec 20, 2017) -> DOWNLOAD HERE

What’s the issue?

There was a problem in Esri’s data production process that resulted in a data discrepancy with the GfK MRI adult-based survey data that’s included in the current release of the Business Analyst 2017 U.S. local data update.

Who does it affect?

This issue could affect you if you use the “Create Survey Profile” tool with the MRI adult-based survey data in Business Analyst Desktop’s Segmentation/Target Marketing module.

It could also affect you if you use the “Understanding Target Customers” REST endpoint with the MRIGroups parameter in Business Analyst Server.

The problem is isolated to these use cases and does not affect any of the other data that are included with the 2017 U.S. local data update.

What if I’m affected?

If you are using either of these tools with the current data release, we recommend that you discontinue using them as part of your workflow until the underlying data issue is resolved

Reference Links

·        “Create Survey Profile” tool in Business Analyst Desktop (online documentation): http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/extensions/business-analyst/create-survey-profile.htm

·        “Understanding Target Customers” REST endpoint in Business Analyst Server (online documentation): http://help.arcgis.com/en/businessanalyst/10.5/server/services/rest/reference/index.htm?e_understandingtargetcustomers.html

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The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other.    See also a presentation on this book in CGA Geography Colloquium and an article on the Harvard Gazette.

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AUDIO recordings of the Conference are linked below.

The rapid proliferation of ‘smart’ objects have enabled a variety of sensors operating a wide range of scales – from the body to the planet – resulting in unprecedented volumes of digital data. The field of Data Science has been increasingly called upon to take on the unique challenges represented by this proliferation. Lacking any singular identity, Data Science may include discovering, understanding and communicating complex behaviors, patterns, relationships and trends from “big data” using mathematics/statistics, computation/automation, and domain knowledge – combined. Data Science has as its subject nearly any field for which there exists high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation (Gartner 2012).

The emergence of Data Science has provided a renewed opportunity to consider the importance of spatial relationships at the heart of these smart sensors and Internet of Things (IoT). Indeed, space and time are core properties of ‘big data’, so called, and spatiotemporal analysis is inherently an important facet in Data Science. From satellite images to social media streams, from census and parcels to records of trade, food, energy, climate, disease, crime, conflicts, etc., big data with space and time signatures are essential for understanding our world and responding to its challenges.

This conference aims at bringing together mainstream data scientists and geographic information scientists, to review the status of both fields, explore commonalities between the two, and identify the relevance of space and time in Data Science. The program will highlight new breakthroughs in Data Science; examine how to incorporate them into GIScience; demonstrate GIScience contributions to Data Science, particularly in terms of handling space and time; explore the proper relationship between Data Science and GIScience; discuss opportunities for reaching new audiences; and identify common educational needs for a data scientist and a GIScientist.

The event will start with a half-day hands-on demo and training workshop on Thursday afternoon, followed by a full day of plenary sessions on Friday, which will include a keynote address, presentation sessions, panel discussions, and closing remarks. Invited speakers will engage with the audience in discussions on the current status, achievements, lessons learned, unmet needs, challenges, potentials, and perspectives of spatiotemporal analytics in the context of Data Science, particularly as it relates to academic research and learning.

Keynote Speakers

Francesca Dominici, Co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Michael F. Goodchild, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of California at Santa Barbara

Preliminary Program

Organizing Committee: David DiBiase (Esri); Wendy Guan (CGA); Elizabeth Langdon-Gray (HDSI); Matt Wilson (CGA)

SPONSORED by:

 Day 1  – Workshops – Thursday, April 26th, 2017

Introduction - Jason Ur (CGA)  AUDIO

 Day 2  – Conference – April 27th, 2017

Introduction - Elizabeth Hess (IQSS)  AUDIO

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CGA Newsletter November 2017 PDF (Download)

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Geoprivacy and Its Impact on Spatial Analysis

A presentation via video conference by Mayra A. Zurbarán

PRESENTATION SLIDES (PDF)    AUDIO RECORDING (MP3)

Noon - 1:30, CGIS South Building, Room S354

Abstract: Location privacy or geoprivacy is critical to controlling access to user’s information in context-aware applications. Location-based services pose privacy risks for users, due to the inferences that could be made about them from their location information and the potential misuse of this data by providers or third-party companies. This led to the creation of many location privacy protection mechanisms that imply trade-offs between privacy, quality of service and quality of information; being the last one a valuable asset for commercial and research purposes. For assessing the impact of location obfuscation or masking algorithms on Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), it is proposed a comparison using kernel density maps and hotspot analysis with geolocated tweets collected in Italy through the Streaming API and the resulting obfuscated data after applying obfuscation algorithms. Results show that the configuration settings for the privacy algorithms, as well as for the performance analysis, are critical to guarantee an adequate balance between protection and quality of the information.

This talk will discuss location privacy protection mechanisms and their different
purposes in location-based services; focusing on masking techniques to assess and minimize their impact on spatial analysis.

Bio: Mayra is a Ph.D student in Computer Science at the Universidad del Norte in Baranquilla, Columbia.  Her research focuses on humanitarian causes, ethical management of data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Lunch will be served.

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Speaker:  Ryan Enos  (Harvard University, Dept of Government)

AUDIO RECORDING (MP3)

Date and Time:   Thursday Dec 7th,  12:00pm  -  1:30pm

The Space Between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. This rigorous research illuminates the profound effects of social geography on how we relate, think, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.

Speaker Bio:

Ryan Enos is an Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.  He is a leading expert on the intersection of geography, psychology, and politics.  His research has appeared in top scholarly publications, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Political Science Review, and in worldwide news outlets, such as the New York Times.  Prior to earning his PhD, he was a high school teacher on the South Side of Chicago, an urban space which inspired much of his research. This is his first book.

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After an absence of over two decades, foreign archaeology has returned in earnest to one of the “cradles of civilization” in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Two wars, international sanctions, and internal unrest had together brought archaeological research nearly to a standstill; only a few under-funded Iraqi teams and a handful of intrepid Europeans attempted fieldwork following the first Gulf War of 1991. Following a decline in political violence that began in 2008, archaeologists have returned to the Republic of Iraq. The resumption of fieldwork in the southern “heartland of cities” has been significant but slow, and hampered by internal politics. In the autonomous Kurdistan Region, however, foreign research has expanded rapidly and continuously, in partnership with local archaeologists and institutes. This essay reviews these new developments, discusses how the new discoveries are challenging long-held ideas and filling blank spaces on the archaeological map, and suggests some new directions for the future of Mesopotamian studies.

URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5615/neareastarch.80.3.0176

Links:
Near Eastern Archaeology, Vol. 80, No. 3 (September 2017), pp. 176-187

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Modern India 

-   Harvard Geospatial Library  maintains licenses to India Adminstrative Boundaries datasets for several years (including 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011).  These are available to Harvard affiliates for research purposes.  Please contact the Harvard Map Collection, if you are unable to obtain the data throug the HGL website. 

Breakdown of India Datasets licensed by Harvard Map Collection for use by Harvard affiliates:

-   GADM  provides administrative boundaries for India at the ADM0 (nation), ADM1 (states), ADM2 (districts, zilā), ADM3 (sub-divisions).   The GADM does not provide historical versions, nor any particular source information.   Be careful to examine the GADM to see if it will suit your purposes. 

 -  Indian Village Boundaries are available from a volunteer created project called Data{Meet}.  Since this is an open source project, we have not been able to evaluate the accuracy or completeness of the village data, which is available in GeoJSON format.  (Note GeoJSON can easily be converted into Shapefiles, using GDAL commands or in QGIS.

India Administrative Atlas 1872-2001 provides details on the changes of adminstrative boundaries.  See Record in Stanford Univ Library.

India Air Pollution Data

In addition to some data being collected at CGA, see the following data sources

(provided by Kat Nicholson, also downloadable in detailed Excel Spreadsheet).

Webmaps and Webservices

Bhuvan Indian Geo-Platform of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).   Provides a rich platform of Land Use, Flood Hazards, Admin Divisions, Transportation, Waterbodies, and many other layers.  These can be browsed and queried online, or connected to as WMS layers.

Water Resources of India provides a webmap of many useful layers such as watersheds, river basins, aquifers, groundwater depth, soil productivity, etc.  This map makes use of data published by the Water Resources Information System of the Central Water Commission.  Read more details.

Open Government Data provides several WMS services.

MapMyIndia Geocoding services  from eLOC India include location codes and web APIs.

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Presentation by Andres Sevtsuk, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Noon - 1:30 on Thursday, November 2 in room S354, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.

AUDIO RECORDING (MP3)       SLIDES (PDF)

Urban design and urban analytics have emerged as equally important, but separate fields of scholarship. Those concerned with design, work with a forward-looking epistemology, assessing ideas based on their normative merits in an uncertain future. Those who work in urban analytics, use social, natural and computer science methods to explain urban phenomena as they are now or as they were in the past. The difference between forward- versus backward-looking orientation has kept the disciplines apart and created a methodological as well as practical divide, whereby good urban analytics do not necessarily lead to good urban design, nor does good urban design require good urban analytics. Investigating this divide, I explore how the domains of design and analysis can be better integrated in an exploratory design process, using two projects as examples. The projects include a planned integration of light rail stations in Surabaya with the surrounding urban fabric with the aim of supporting higher ridership, and a planned placement and sizing of community retail and service clusters into newly designed large-scale public housing environments in Singapore. In both cases, an iterative design - analysis process required a) that normative goals be determined for assessing design outcomes, b) that well-defined measurement techniques be adopted to evaluate how closely the goals are achieved in each design scenario and c) that numerous design scenarios be generated and tested via computerized simulations. To generalize the processes, their pros and cons, I discuss which types of urban design problems an integrated design-analysis approach is suitable for and what this could mean for urban analytics curricula in urban planning degree programs. 

Bio 

Andres Sevtsuk is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His most recent research has focuses on developing new spatial network analytic tools for planners and designers and on analyzing the spatial distribution of retail and food service establishments in cities globally. His work also addresses tools and methods for modeling and designing pedestrian-oriented urban environments. Andres has worked with a number of city governments, international organizations, planning practices and developers on urban designs, plans and policies in both developed and rapidly developing urban environments, most recently including those in Indonesia, Singapore, Estonia and the US. He is the author of the Urban Network Analysis toolbox, which is used by researchers and practitioners around the world to study spatial relationships in cities along networks. He has led various international research projects; exhibited his research at TEDx, the World Cities Summit and the Venice Biennale; and received the President’s Design Award in Singapore, International Buckminster Fuller Prize and Ron Brown/Fulbright Fellowship. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Planning at the Singapore University of technology and Design (SUTD), and a lecturer at MIT.

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