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Series Kick-off and 1st Geospatial Fellow

Shaowen Wang will provide an introduction to the Geospatial Fellows Webinar Series.

Gary Langham will provide a few words of welcome.

Xiang Chen will showcase the findings or outcomes of their project thus far as a Geospatial Fellow for advancing COVID-19 research and education.

Michael F. Goodchild will serve as a discussant for the webinar.

Shaowen Wang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Gary Langham
American Association of Geographers

Xiang Chen
University of Connecticut

Michael F. Goodchild
Arizona State University, University of California, Santa Barbara

Shaowen Wang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Introduction to the Geospatial Fellows Webinar Series – Advancing COVID-19 Research and Education through Reproducible Geospatial Science

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has put the US and the world into an extremely difficult situation. Complex and massive geospatial data has been rapidly collected for the fight against the COVID-19 grand challenge across the globe. Harnessing such geospatial data requires developing and integrating cutting-edge geospatial software capabilities, building interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations, and ensuring that research findings are readily accessible and reproducible. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a project to conceptualize a Geospatial Software Institute (GSI; https://gsi.cigi.illinois.edu/) for establishing a long-term hub of excellence in geospatial software infrastructure that can serve diverse research and education communities. The GSI conceptualization project has selected sixteen Geospatial Fellows to collaboratively advance COVID-19 research and education through reproducible geospatial science. This webinar series will feature the work of the Geospatial Fellows focused on the following four themes: (1) making geospatial research computationally reproducible; (2) developing novel geospatial analysis and modeling capabilities; (3) assessing health disparities; and (4) understanding COVID-19 impacts. This talk will briefly introduce the GSI conceptualization project and the Geospatial Fellows program for launching the webinar series.

Shaowen Wang is a Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science; Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar; and an Affiliate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has served as Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC since 2013. He served as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for CyberGIS from 2010 to 2017 and Lead of NCSA’s Earth and Environment Theme from 2014 to 2017. His research has been actively supported by a number of U.S. government agencies (e.g., CDC, DOE, EPA, NASA, NIH, NSF, USDA, and USGS) and industry. He has served as the principal investigator of several multi-institution projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for establishing the interdisciplinary field of cyberGIS and advancing related scientific problem solving in various domains (e.g., agriculture, bioenergy, emergency management, geography and spatial sciences, geosciences, and public health).

Gary Langham American Association of Geographers

Gary Langham is the executive director of AAG. As a broadly trained scientist with more than 20 years of experience working on science-based solutions for people and the environment, he has published peer-reviewed papers on a range of topics, including climate change, biogeography, seabirds, evolution, genetics, physiology, animal behavior, and conservation. Formerly, Langham was vice president and chief scientist at the National Audubon Society, where he directed Audubon’s wide-reaching scientific initiatives and studies, including the first comprehensive analysis of the effects of future climate changes on 588 North American bird species. In 2000, Langham founded the Neotropical Grassland Conservancy to foster grassland research with grants and equipment. He completed a National Science Foundation bioinformatics postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University.

Xiang Chen University of Connecticut

Modeling COVID-19 Infections across Townships with Social Distancing Metrics

In the early development of COVID-19, large-scale preventive measures, such as border control and air travel restrictions, were implemented to slow international and domestic transmissions. When these measures were in full effect, new cases of infection would be primarily induced by community spread, such as human interactions within and between neighboring cities and towns, which is generally known as the meso-scale. Existing studies of COVID-19 using mathematical models are unable to accommodate the need for meso-scale modeling, because of the unavailability of COVID-19 data at this scale and the different timings of local intervention policies. In this respect, we propose a meso-scale mathematical model of COVID-19, named the meso-scale Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered (MSEIR) model, using town-level infection data in the state of Connecticut. We consider the spatial interaction in terms of the inter-town travel in the model. Based on the developed model, we evaluated how different strengths of social distancing policy enforcement may impact future epidemic curves based on two evaluative metrics: compliance and containment. The developed model and the simulation results have contributed to community-level assessment and better preparedness for COVID-19.

Xiang Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut, USA. He earned a Ph.D. in geography at The Ohio State University. His research interests are focused on GIScience and community health (e.g., obesity, COVID-19, and dengue fever). He employs GIS approaches (e.g., big data analytics, geovisualization, deep learning) and accessibility theories to unveil the socioeconomic and health inequalities within urban communities.

Michael F. Goodchild Arizona State University, University of California, Santa Barbara

Michael F. Goodchild is a global leader in Geographic Information Science who joined ASU’s faculty in 2017. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directed the National Center for Geographic Information Analysis, the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science, and the Center for Spatial Studies. Professor Goodchild is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2007 he received the Prix Vautrin Lud, considered the highest honor in the field of geography.