GeoVISTA Center Updates

Frank Hardisty presenting at the Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology

GeoVISTA Assistant Director Frank Hardisty will travel to Florence, Italy next week to present a paper at the 16th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology. His paper is titled: Geographic Visualization of Archeological Sites: a Cisjordanian Example.

GeoVISTA Members at Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting

GeoVISTA members and alumni are presenting 16 different papers at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting being held in New York City on February 24-28, 2012.

Frank Hardisty presents poster at AGU meeting

Frank Hardisty presented a poster at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) held in San Francisco this week. The poster, "Modelling Atlantic Basin Tropical Cyclone Storm Tracks", was co-authored with Desmond Carroll.

GeoVISTA at ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems

Several GeoVISTA members and alumni participated in the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, held this week in Chicago.

GeoVISTA at IEEE VisWeek 2011

GeoVISTA members and alums will play several key roles at IEEE VisWeek in Providence, Rhode island this week. VisWeek consists of three individual conferences: IEEE Visualization, IEEE Information Visualization, and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST).

GeoVISTA at North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting

The GeoVISTA Center had a strong presence at the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2011 meeting, held this week in Madison, Wisconsin. GeoVISTA faculty, graduate students, and alumni presented their work.

GeoSocialApp website launched

The GeoSocialApp is a visualization tool that supports the exploration of spatial-social networks among network, geographical, and attribute spaces. Mixing both computational and visual methods, GeoSocialApp enables discovery of complex patterns in large spatial-social network datasets in an effective and efficient way. GeoVISTA Ph.D. student Wei Luo is the chief developer for GeoSocialApp. He presented his work at the Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks, held in conjunction with the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in Chicago. Wei was awarded an NSF Travel Grant to cover the expenses.

Sen Xu received ESRI student travel award

GeoVISTA graduate student Sen Xu was one of four recipients of an ESRI student travel award to cover the costs of registration and workshops at the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'11), held in Belfast, Maine this week. Sen participated in the Doctoral Colloquium with his paper "Discovering and Tracking Events From News, Blogs and Microblogs on the Web". He also presented at the Ontology of Spatial Thinking Workshop with a paper titled "Understanding View Sizing and Positioning Strategies." Lastly, Sen co-wrote a paper, "Hidden Ontologies - How Mobile Computing Affects the Conceptualization of Geographic Space," which was presented as part of the workshop Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS.

GeoVISTA members at the Conference on Spatial Information Theory

Members of the GeoVISTA Center participated in a number of ways at the 2011 Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT), held in Belfast, Maine, September 12-16th 2011.

Raechel Bianchetti awarded Pennsylvania Space Grant Graduate Fellowship

GeoVISTA graduate student Raechel Bianchetti has been chosen to receive a graduate research fellowship from the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PSGC). The PSGC Graduate Fellowship, a $10,000 award over two years, supports outstanding graduate students working in the fields of study that align with the NASA Mission Directorates: Aeronautics Research, Exploration Systems, Science, and Space Operations.

GeoVISTA members participate in the International Cartographic Conference

The GeoVISTA Center was well-represented at the 25th International Cartographic Conference (ICC), held this year in Paris from July 3rd-8th.

Student projects from Dynamic Cartographic Representation now available

�Students enrolled in the course Dynamic Cartographic Representation (GEOG 461W) at Penn State must complete a group project to design and produce a dynamic, map-based, web-capable geospatial tool. The student projects from the last three years are now available to explore on the GeoVISTA website: http://www. geovista.psu.edu/resources/geog461w.html The subjects explored range from traffic patterns, to Marcellus Shale development, to the college selection process.

Ken Pelman presents at ISCRAM conference in Portugal

�On May 10, 2011, GeoVISTA MGIS affiliate Ken Pelman presented his capstone research project at the 2011 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Ken completed a software tool called EvacSpace that is designed to support rapid evacuation planning through an interactive, visually-enabled interface. Most current evacuation planning tools are complex, expensive, and require specialized underlying spatial data. Ken's approach focuses on getting immediate results with little or no training through a clever use of Google Maps, Directions, Fusion Tables, and Charts. Ken came to the Penn State MGIS program (www.pennstategis.com) after completing his M.S. degree at University Park in the Department of Meteorology and taking a job in Washington, DC at NOAA. While working at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center he's been working on his MGIS degree, in addition to raising two sons with his wife. Ken is the first GeoVISTA MGIS affiliate, and as such he received a travel stipend to support his trip to Portugal to present on behalf of the GeoVISTA Center and MGIS program. Ken's advisor is GeoVISTA Assistant Director Dr. Anthony Robinson. .

GeoVISTA Alum Derek Swingley joins ESRI

�Derek Swingley (B.S. Geography '04) is returning to ESRI to work on their JavaScript API. Derek has been working as a GIS Programmer with Axio Power, a renewable energy company, over the past year. In his spare time Derek builds geospatial web applications, which can be seen at his website: http://swingley.appspot.com/. One of his applications, BunchaMaps, was recently featured in a news story at KSTP-TV, a Minnesota ABC affiliate. BunchaMaps compares google maps, bing maps, arcgis.com maps and open street map maps in a single browser window. For more see http://www.bunchamaps.com/.

GeoVISTA members at AAG 2011

�GeoVISTA members and alumni participated in the 107th Annual Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting held in Seattle on April 12-16, 2011.

Rob Roth gives Coffee Hour Talk

�On Friday March 18th, GeoVISTA Ph.D. candidate Rob Roth will be giving a talk at the Geography Department's weekly Coffee Hour series. Rob's talk, "Useful and Usable Geovisualization for Crime Analysis," will be streamed live online at 4PM, and the archived webcast will be made available through the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute.

SensePlace2 website now live

�The GeoVISTA Center has launched a new website to highlight SensePlace2, a geovisual analytics application that forages place-time-attribute information from the Twitterverse and supports crisis management through visually-enabled sensemaking with the information derived. The website describes the development and purpose of SensePlace2. In the near future, the SensePlace2 application will be made available for anyone to try and video demonstrations will be added to the website.

Paper featured in upcoming issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science

�A team of GeoVISTA researchers recently participated in a forthcoming special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science resulting from the 2010 AutoCarto meeting. The project team included GeoVISTA researchers Robert Roth, Ben Finch, Justine Blanford, Alex Klippel, Anthony Robinson, and Alan MacEachren. The peer-reviewed paper reports on the application of the card sorting method to Cartography and was completed as part of the Map Symbology Project. The paper will appear in the April (volume 38, number 2) issue of CaGIS. The title of the paper is "Card sorting for cartographic research and practice."

GeoVISTA alum Chaoqing Yu featured in Nature

�Chaoqing Yu, who earned his Ph.D. at Penn State Geography in 2001, has written a "World View" piece for the upcoming February 17th issue of the journal Nature. Yu is now an associate professor with the Center for Earth System Science and the Institute for Global Change Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Anuj Jaiswal accepts PARC research position

�GeoVISTA Grad Affiliate Anuj Jaiswal (AJ) has accepted a PARC co-op research position in the Corporate Operations group. AJ will work with existing research and business teams in the Corporate Operations groups with a focus on collecting and analyzing social opinion data, exploring novel methodologies and algorithms, developing prototypes, and capturing innovative approaches in the form of Invention Disclosures and conference/journal papers.

Buckingham and Roth Edit Special Digital Issue of Cartographic Perspectives

�GeoVISTA Research Assistant Rob Roth recently teamed with Tanya Buckingham of the UW-Madison Cart Lab to guest edit a special digital issue of Cartographic Perspectives, the flagship journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The special issue is presented in the context of an exciting transition to modernize CP for primarily digital, online dissemination and to update CP's content to serve more equitably the diverse interests of both researchers and practitioners in the cartographic community.

Paper accepted in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems

�GeoVISTA Alum Brian Tomaszewski, now an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), has authored a paper along with GeoVISTA researchers Justine Blanford, Kevin Ross, Scott Pezanowski and Alan MacEachren which has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. The title of the paper is "Supporting Geographically-aware Web Document Foraging and Sensemaking."

Penn State undergraduates participate in GeoVISTA internship on geovisual analytics of IED attacks

�Undergraduate students Nick Maziekas and Matt Murdock recently completed GIScience Internships (GEOG 495G) with the GeoVISTA Center. The students worked on the Basic Ordinance Observational Management System (BOOMsys), a prototype geovisual application that depicts spatiotemporal data about improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq.

Spring Course: Classification, Conceptualization and Categorization in Spatial Information Science

�The Geography Department at Penn State will be offering a graduate course on Classification, Conceptualization, and Categorization in Spatial Information Science: A Cognitive Perspective (GEOG 597D) during the Spring 2011 semester. The instructor for the course will be Dr. Alexander Klippel.

Context Discovery Application featured by iVAC

�The Context Discovery Application (CDA) has been highlighted on the Integrated Visualization and Analytics Community (iVAC) website.

Website Launched for STempo project

The GeoVISTA Center has launched a website to highlight our NGA-funded project, STempo.