Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science

Using as motivation the recently collected large amounts of GPS data from a variety of transportation studies in the United States and Europe, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funded a Peer Exchange meeting in Santa Barbara, CA (10-11 October 2005). The intent of this Peer Exchange was to assemble experts to discuss potential approaches on using GPS vehicle traces for defining space-time paths and prisms to be used in activity modeling and microsimulation for transportation analysis. This Peer Exchange brought together travel demand forecasters, experts in travel behavior and GPS data collection, and geographers to discuss different approaches to analyzing space-time prisms for transportation forecasting needs. This report documents the discussions and recommendations from the Peer Exchange.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funded a Peer Exchange meeting in Santa Barbara, CA (10-11 October 2005) for travel demand forecasters, experts in travel behavior and GPS data collection, and geographers to discuss potential approaches on using GPS vehicle traces for defining space-time paths and prisms to be used in activity modeling and microsimulation for transportation analysis. This document features the position papers prepared by participants prior to the meeting.

This workshop assembled thirty scholars with substantive or methodological interest in the study of global-scale socioeconomic processes across time and space. The purpose of the meeting was to develop ideas for research projects on the structure and dynamics of globalization using new research technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), spatial analysis methods (including network analysis), and sources of geographic information not usually employed by globalization researchers. This document provides the agenda, abstracts, and papers considered at the meeting, hosted by UC Riverside.

This interdisciplinary meeting of 20 behavioral science and health researchers explored the connections among social risk theory, cultural constructions of health and risk, and spatial analysis of health. The purpose of the meeting was to establish common grounds for new interdisciplinary research proposals that bring together spatial analysis with work looking at perception of health risk. The agenda and position papers of papers of participants are presented in this document.

This meeting brought together researchers on spatial and social interactions in the economics profession with researchers in geography and related fields to explore developments in geographic information science (GIS) and in new spatial econometric tools for possible uses for economic investigations of social interactions.

The objectives of this meeting were:(1) to demonstrate, showcase, and benchmark state-of-the-art tools and to facilitate interaction among specialized software developers; (2) to promote a dialogue among the wide range of developers about priorities and guidelines for software design, data and model standards, inter-operability, and open environments, including specific open source standards for spatial data analysis; and (3) to introduce CSISS' open source software development initiative, the "OpenSpace" project. A brief introduction is followed by position papers from meeting participants.

In December, 2001 the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS; http://csiss.org) and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS; http://www.ucgis.org) held a specialist meeting to explore location-based services, and their implications and significance for the social sciences and for geographic information science. There are a number of reasons for believing that LBS will have significant impact on the social sciences, stemming from three basic arguments. First, LBS today represents only the beginning of a series of technological innovations that can potentially impact society in numerous ways, ranging from surveillance and the invasion of personal privacy, to technologically induced changes in human spatial behavior, the role of location in social networks, and the spatial structuring of retail and other services. Second, LBS have the potential to provide novel sources of data to social science, including detailed information about daily activities and their locations. Third, LBS technology has the potential to allow researchers to access databases, and conduct sophisticated analysis of data, while located in the field, and immediately following acquisition of data. The meeting of experts to review these technologies and their implications considered a range of recommendations for further research and educational innovation, all elaborated upon in this report.

This meeting (December 2001 in Santa Barbara), sponsored by CSISS and UCGIS explored the advent of location-based services and their implications and significance for the social sciences and for geographic information science. Specific issues considered included: the use of LBS to support primary data capture in the social sciences, requirements for new  analytic tools to visualize and investigate such data, privacy and related issues associated with LBS data, and new forms of social behavior enabled by LBS.

A workshop on Agent-based Models of Land Use / Land Cover Change in Santa Barbara (hosted by CSISS) took place prior to and in conjunction with the National Academy of Sciences’ Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on Adaptive Agents, Intelligence and Emergent Human Organization: Capturing Complexity through Agent-Based Modeling. This took place at the Beckman Center, Irvine, California, 6-7 October 2001. This document features the schedule, summary of proceedings, and Position Papers by participants in the workshop.

The objectives of the specialist meeting on spatial externalities were two-fold: (1) to assess the status and future of “spatial thinking” in economics in general, and (2) in the context of the study of spatial externalities in particular. Specifically, participants were asked to address what is the perceived added value of spatial models and spatial methods, to identify critical impediments and to suggest the most promising research directions where a spatial perspective can provide added value to the solution of economic questions. The meeting was organized around three main topics: theoretical perspectives on spatial externalities; methodological perspectives on spatial externalities; and spatial analysis in economic research.