Dr. Leila DeFloriani has invited Dr. Dieter Pfoser from the Department of Geography at Geoinformation Science at George Mason University to present at the March 14th Geography Department seminar.

Seminar: Locations, linkage, and trajectories - urban science case studies

Urban scenarios are a treasure trove for domain-driven social science research given that complex human behavior can be observed in a data rich setting. This talk will showcase some (hopefully) interesting examples in which data can drive decision making or help explain interesting phenomena in an urban context. We will look at the relationship between OSM coffee shop data and home price information to reason about urban change in NYC and examine human mobility in Washington DC by mining diverse datasets such as farecard data and road traffic information. While the presented work relies on machine learning, such an approach has its limitations when challenged with rich, but also incomplete datasets. This talk will conclude with an outlook as to what complementary/alternative approaches for the comprehension of complex urban phenomena could be.

Dr. Dieter Pfoser is a professor and currently the chair of the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University. He is also a GMU DataLab Steering Committee member, leading the Urban Science thematic area. He received his PhD in computer science from Aalborg University, Denmark in 2000 and an MS in Information Systems from Johannes Kepler University, Austria in 1996. At GMU he teaches courses related to geospatial data management, Linked Data, Web application development using open-source software, data visualization, and data-driven storytelling. His research interests include data management and data mining for spatial and spatiotemporal data (e.g., map matching and map construction algorithms), graph algorithms for dynamic networks, and user-generated content. In recent years, his work has focused on solving data-driven urban science problems. Over the years, Dr. Pfoser’s research has been supported by grants from NSF, NGA, DARPA, DHS, and the European Commission. He has co-authored over 100 fully refereed papers, one book, edited five books and several journal issues, organized conferences, served on more than 40 program committees and on the editorial board of two journals.