Category: Conferences

A final post where I highlight more of the best papers at GISRUK 2014 in Glasgow – see Part 1 and Part 2.

Geodemographic classification for Ireland

It was an early start on a Bank Holiday Good Friday, particularly as I was commuting from Edinburgh, but I made it in for the second half of Chris Brunsdon (NUI Maynooth)’s talk on creating a geodemographic classification for Ireland. Applying many of the same techniques used to produce the 2001 (and indeed the forthcoming 2011) OAC for the UK, but applying an Irish emphasis – where availability of septic tanks is an important census variable – using using PAM rather than K-means clustering, and ensuring a fully reproducable approach. Six “broad clusters” were identified, as shown on the colourful dendrogram here. Chris also showed maps of the classification, both for Ireland in general and Dublin in particular.

Mapping neighbourhoods from internet-derived data

Defining London’s “real” neighbourhoods is something of a preoccupation for me at the moment, with a number of related maps on the Mapping London blog, so this was a talk of great interest to me. Paul Brindley (Nottingham). There are a wide variety of potential sources of data to define neighborhoods – social media, Flickr photograph tags, OpenStreetMap etc. Paul concentrated on postal addresses – specifically the “unnecessary” bit between the street and city, which people habitually still include. By mapping these extra pieces of information to postcodes, and also looking at their population and where their footprints overlapped, an informal geography of neighbourhoods, defined by people themselves, is revealed. The pre-press version of the paper is online.

Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Toolkit

Finally, a bit of a surprise, and a talk that would have fitted in well at FOSS4G in Nottingham last year, Whitebox GAT is a GIS package focused on complex raster (e.g. LIDAR) manipulation and analysis. The open-source project looks powerful and impressive, but has a low profile, particularly as it’s not part of OSGeo, so the lead author was at the conference, and gave this talk, as part of an effort to increase its profile.

After the conference concluded, I took the opportunity of the unusual weather for Glasgow (i.e. sunny, warm) for a wander around the city, going via the University campus, the new Riverside Museum (and tall ship), the “Squinty Bridge” and Glasgow Green.

Above: View of the Glasgow University campus from Dumbarton Bridge, and the Riverside Museum building.

GISRUK 2015 will be at Leeds University.

Following on from part one of my conference review, here are my favourite talks from the middle part of the conference.

Social media and spatial modelling – Tweets and museums

Robin Lovelace (Newcastle) won best paper at the end of the conference, for this talk on examining tweets “geofenced” around many local museums, to see from where these people travelled and what they had to say about the museum.

Agent Based Models and GIS for disaster zones

Sarah Wise (George Mason University & UCL) presented a chapter from her Ph.D on the use of GIS in immediate post-disaster zones, focusing on the Haiti earthquake. OpenStreetMappers quickly mapped Port-au-Prince and other badly damaged areas, using satellite and aerial imagery made available, and Sarah studied the resulting crowdsourced GI information. An agent-based model was then used, with the fractured road network, to model how survivors would move to locations where food and other aid was made available, the visualisation of the model output showing how well different areas, some with considerable damage to the road network, were served in the days after the disaster. Sarah won Best Paper on Spatial Analysis which is awarded by CASA based on submitted abstracts for the conference.

Visualising activity spaces of urban utility cyclists

This talk by Seraphim Alvanides (Northumbria) showed that utility cyclists – those aiming to get from A to B as efficiently as possible – are often poorly served by dedicated cycling infrastructure. Where a road route is shorter than a cycleway, more people than you might expect will take the former, and the talk showed some graphics of flows along roads and paths to demonstrate this.

Exposure to air pollution: the quantified self

Jonny Huck (Lancaster) gave one of my favourite presentations of the conference, and certainly one of the most visually impressive. It first explored personal sensors (for heart rate, breathing etc) and the internet of things (with small internet-connected devices), then combining the two to detail a device, based on Arduino, e-Health, Waspmote and Android, for monitoring exposure to pollution – combining breathing rate and air pollution levels – for a walk around the campus at Lancaster University, where climbing up steep hills in the campus had as much impact as walking alongside major roads. It’s early stage research and I’m not sure the very intrusive breathing monitor is going to catch on, but certainly points to a quantified future. At CASA, we have started to acquire and evaluate personal and environmental sensors, with FitBits and pollution sensors in the office, so a CASA-centric approach to this kind of research might not be too far off.

The final session of the day took the form of a series of plenaries about interdisciplinary research. While some of these were interesting in their own right (particularly, an unexpected one on cellular biology!) I didn’t get as much out of them as I did from the paper sessions.

At the end of the second day of the conference most people went to the dinner – I didn’t have a ticket for this though, so headed back to central Glasgow with Addy, who’s written up his thoughts on the conference here on the EDINA Go-Geo blog. My comments on the final day will appear in the final part, tomorrow.

I was at the Geographic Information Systems Research United Kingdom (GISRUK) 2014 conference last week. GISRUK is the key GIS conference for early-career academic researchers in the UK and Ireland, and is hosted by a different university in the British Isles each year. The audience are mainly UK academics, with young researchers and professors in roughly equal attendance, along with some academics from abroad, including Malaysia, Nigeria and Canada. They are definitely more geo and less tech, the conference being relatively quiet on Twitter, especially compared to conferences such as State of the Map or Wherecamp EU.

This year the conference was hosted up at Glasgow University. Being tucked into the Easter break might have meant a reduced attendance on previous years. However, there were many good talks in the two parallel streams that ran through the three days of the conference – some 50 talks altogether, plus plenaries – and some talks were very popular, with attendees just about squeezing in to the venue.

In this post (and in the second and third parts, to follow) I’ve highlighted the talks that I found the most interesting. Of course, with two streams, there were inevitably interesting sessions which overlapped, and so I may have missed some of the best of all – in a couple of cases I ended up changing room half-way though a session. I’ve paraphrased the talk titles here.

Streets vs landmarks for text-based directions for pedestrians

This talk, given by William Mackaness from Edinburgh, was on an interesting study monitoring how people get from A to B, given one of two kinds of text directions – landmark based “turn left at the Bank of Scotland branch coming up on the left” or street based “continue on George Street, turn left onto Frederick Street in 500m” and monitored, with GPS and movement sensors, how well they moved through the urban realm, with landmark based directions proving better. Of course, these are harder for automated systems as street names a more uniform and consistent storage type than landmarks.

Clustering landmark tags in urban images

This was probably my favourite talk of the whole conference. By the same team as the above, it was presented by Phil Bartie (St Andrews) and outlined algorithms used to detect buildings and other landmarks from photos, by looking at where people tag interesting features in set photographs, how they tag them, and then linking the tags and locations together to try and separate visually close (but distinct) features, and combine different elements of the same feature that are spatially far apart. The heatmap examples used in the talk were compelling.

Using social media data to assess crime hotspots

Nick Malleson’s (Leeds) talk looked at tackling the “daytime population” problem – crime statistics tend to exaggerate city centres, as these have a large daytime population but a low residential (i.e. census/official) population, which areas are typically normalised by to produce a crime rate. By looking at georeferenced social media activity as a proxy for daytime population, the city centre hotspots disappear and move into the most deprived suburbs – although these need to be controlled also by a possible lower-than-average use of social media in such areas.

Exploring links between coal-mining, deprivation and health

This known link was mapped out well by Paul Norman (Leeds), using some great maps of the relevant census data. The talk included a potted history of coal mines and their phased closures. The study was longitudinal – combining statistics over multiple censuses, with data on opening and closing of mines (mine opening dates often being hard to determine).

At the end of the first day of the conference, therewas a reception at the opulent City Chambers in the centre of Glasgow, where I had the novelty of being served a glass of Irn Bru (Scotland’s other national drink, and tougher to find in London) by a waiter, in a room surrounded with marble and various paintings of former council leaders!

Part two to follow tomorrow. Addy Pope at EDINA Go-Geo has also reviewed the conference.