Both the natural environment and human society are highly dynamic systems, whose constituent elements, such as humans, diseases, commodities, funds, and the intangibles like information, are constantly moving from place to place on the Earth surface. Such location-to-location networks, referred to as spatial interactions, are among the essential forces that influence many physical and socioeconomic processes and thus are often critical components in a wide range of research fields and decision-making. For example, to prepare for potential pandemic outbreaks, it is important to understand how places are connected via human activities. This understanding can provide insights regarding how a virus may spread over space and time and thus help devise effective mitigation and response strategies in time-critical situations. Confronting the increasingly large datasets of spatial interactions that now are available and rapidly growing needs to understand such spatial dynamics requires powerful methods to explore such datasets, extract complex (and unexpected) patterns, and communicate the findings in easy-to-understand ways. To meet these needs, this CAREER award will fund an early-career scientist to research, develop, and evaluate an integrated computational-visual analysis framework for the exploratory analysis of spatial interactions. The investigator's research will develop a suite of complementary computational algorithms and visualization techniques that will work synergistically to generalize spatial interaction information from various perspectives and support a human-centered process for pattern searching and knowledge construction. These new tools will be evaluated using experiments (with synthetic and real data), user tests, and example applications (migration analysis, pandemic analysis, and climate analysis). Graduate and undergraduate student participation in both the research and evaluation will be essential elements in the research, and the investigator will apply his findings to help develop lesson plans and exercises to help K-12 teachers improve classroom teaching.
This project will have broad impacts in diverse fields (such as public health, demography, transportation, and economics) and for various groups of users (such as scientists, policy makers, and the public). The investigator's goals are to improve the analysis and understanding of complex spatial interaction data for new knowledge and to enhance public awareness and learning with better visual means for the representation and presentation of spatial knowledge. The project will foster a developer and user community through open-source software development, and a web portal will be established to disseminate data, graphics, interactive media, and software packages to researchers and the public. The project will provide excellent education and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and it will yield new curricular materials and approaches to help K-12 teachers improve pre-college education in geography and a broad range of other subjects.
