Collegium Helveticum Workshop on Movement Analytics in the Era of Big Data and Open Science
June 19–20, 2024 Irchel Campus, University of Zurich
The research on movement data is developing fast, with applications spanning from health, mobility and sustainability research to movement ecology and climate change. Extensive technologies and data are available that facilitate developing new analytical methods and movement insights. However, open science remains a challenge in the field of computational movement analysis. Movement data and mobility insights are often proprietary and their usage is restricted due to inherent locational privacy and representation issues. Moreover, limited efforts have been made on investigating reproducibility and transferability of movement analytics across application domains and geographic scales.
This workshop brings researchers and technology developers from academia and industry together to discuss these challenges and new advancements in the field across disciplines. The discussions intend to identify gaps and opportunities for advancing open science using movement data through integrative and multidisciplinary approaches to study movement across different disciplines.
Yifei receives a Goodchild Fellowship in Geographic Information Science for Summer 2025. This fellowship recognizes her outstanding academic achievements and commitment to advancing research in Geographic Information Science. The Goodchild Fellowship, generously established by Michael and Fiona Goodchild, honors excellence among geography doctoral students at UC Santa Barbara.
Evgeny Noi and Seonga Cho defended their PhD dissertations in December 2024. Congratulations to Dr. Noi and Dr. Cho! Noi moved to a PostDoc position at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Cho is a postdoc at EPFL in Switzerland
Rongxiang Su defended his PhD dissertation titled “Sensing Human Activity and Interaction Patterns through Movement Observations” in December 2023. Congratulations Dr. Su! Dr Su starts a new PostDoc position at the MIT Senseable City Lab.
Grad students Seonga Cho and Zijian Wan received travel awards from the Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Specialty Group of American Association of Geographers (AAG). Congratulations!
MOVE is attending the AAG 2022 Annual Meeting virtually.
Find us in the following sessions (Times are displayed in US Eastern Time and Pacific Time):
Symposium on Scale in Spatial Analytics and Modeling: Multi-Scale Visualization, Analytics and Modeling, on 2/26/2022, Time: 9:40 AM (6:40 AM Pacific Time). Rongxiang Su; Understanding the impact of temporal scale on human movement analytics
Animals and their use of space 1, on 2/27/2022, Time: 2:00 PM (11:00 AM Pacific Time). Zijian Wan; Inferring environmental drivers of animal migration path choice
AAG 2022 Symposium on Data-Intensive Geospatial Understanding in the Era of AI and CyberGIS: GeoAI and CyberGIS for Advancing Spatial Decision Making, on 3/1/2022, Time: 11:20 AM (8:20 AM Pacific Time). Somayeh Dodge; A human-centered approach to movement data science
The UCSB Department of Geography seeks a graduate student to design and conduct a cognitive study to evaluate visualization of movement data.
To apply and for more information, please contact Dr. Somayeh Dodge (sdodge@ucsb.edu).
The MOVE Laboratory (http://move.geog.ucsb.edu) at the Geography Department at UC Santa Barbara is seeking a research assistant with a background in Spatial Cognition, Geography, Data Visualization, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cartography, Computer Science, or Human-Computer Interaction. The candidate will be engaged in an NSF funded project entitled: “Visualizing Motion: A Framework for the Cartography of Movement”. The project aims to develop and evaluate cartographic theories and tools to understand how humans perceive movement patterns using different visualization forms. The candidate will work with Dr. Somayeh Dodge and her team to evaluate the usability of dynamic and interactive visualizations (using both 2D and 3D displays) for mapping movement patterns and the interaction between moving individuals in space and time.
Qualifications:
Applicants must be enrolled in a UCSB Master or PhD program in Geography, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Computer Science, or other related disciplines.
Additional Qualifications:
Knowledge of experimental design and familiarity with cognitive psychology research.
Preferred Qualifications:
Background in visual perception and spatial cognition
Previous experience in cartographic mapping and analysis of movement data
Familiarity with programming languages (e.g. R, Python, Java, JavaScript, Processing, HTML, etc.)
Familiarity with web development
To apply, please send a Cover Letter, your most recent Curriculum Vitae, and the contact information of a reference to Dr. Somayeh Dodge (sdodge@ucsb.edu). Primary consideration will be given to applications received by December 10th, 2021. The position starts in the Winter Quarter 2022.
At the 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021), 27 September 2021, Virtual workshop
AMD 2021 workshop is the 4th workshop in the pre-GIScience conference AMD workshop series, co-organized by Dr. Dodge. This workshop pursues three aims. First, to provide a platform to discuss the state of the art in this domain in the past decade. Second, to discuss the potential of data science methodologies to advance movement analytics in various domains such as human mobility and animal ecology. And third, to identify the key challenges for future research and (re-)define the research agenda towards advancing movement data science. For more information and to participate, please see the workshop webpage.
Workshop Themes
Data science and movement analytics
Integrated science of movement: converging human mobility and movement ecology research
From patterns to processes: Context-dependent movement analytics and bridging the semantic gap
From individuals to collectives: Modeling and analyzing interactions between individuals
Data fusion: Integrating different sensors (e.g. different positioning sensors and accelerometer or locational data with satellite remotely sensed products) and sensing models (checkpoint sensing vs continuous GPS tracking)
From analysis to modeling: Simulation of movement and mobility
Mobility and health
Big mobility data analytics and predictive modeling
Visualization and visual analytics in support of movement analysis
Geoprivacy issues and geomasking methods for mobility data
Ethics of movement data analytics
Workshop Organizers
Somayeh Dodge – University of California Santa Barbara, USA.
Urška Demšar– University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.
Patrick Laube – Institute of Natural Resource Sciences, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Somayeh Dodge received a Faculty Early Career Development Program Award from the National Science Foundation from the National Science Foundation for the project titled CAREER: Modeling Movement and Behavior Responses to Environmental Disruptions. This interdisciplinary project will transform research and education in geographic information science by integrating information on both spatial and temporal change using computational movement analytics. With this study, Somayeh and her team will investigate three core research questions in three different contexts as seen in the framework below: RQ1) Are individuals’ movement and behavior driven by their environment, and how do these relationships vary across spatial scales? RQ2) How can data science better capture movement patterns that reflect change in behavior? RQ3) How can movement be used as a proxy to understand and predict the behavioral adaptation of individuals caused by disruptive events?
Somayeh was a keynote speaker at the GISRUK 2021 conference, an open online conference on April 14-16th, 2021, delivering the talk “Data-driven movement analytics for pandemic response.” The GIS Research UK (GISRUK) Conference is held annually and is the largest academic GIScience conference in the United Kingdom. The keynote is available here.
April 9, 2021, at McGill University
Dr. Dodge gave an invited talk at McGill University’s Department of Geography GeoSpectives Seminar Series, entitled “Using movement as a marker to trace human activity and contact patterns.” The abstract is available here and full seminar series available here.
March 23, 2021, at the University of Zurich
Somayeh was invited to give a colloquium talk entitled “Taking a human-centered data science approach to study movement” at the University of Zurich Department of Geography digital GIScience colloquium. Colloquium agenda and abstract available here.
December 8, 2020, at the University of Maryland
Somayeh was invited to give a seminar entitled “Implications of Scale on Tracing Contact Patterns in Movement” at the Seminars Series on Spatial Multiscale Analytics, Applied Research, and Technology (SMAART). Center for Geospatial Science, University of Maryland, 8 December 2020. More information about the talk is available here.
May 26, 2020, at the University of California Santa Barbara
Somayeh was invited to give a seminar at the Spring Seminars on Issues, Approaches, and Consequences of the COVID-19 Crisis, Session on COVID-19: Analytics and Modeling for Prevention, at the UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Research Centers, NOVIM, and Cottage Health. She presented her work on “An Analytical Time Geography Approach to Tracing Contacts in Movement Data”. More information about the seminar and the video of the talk are available here.
Jovany’s poster presentation at the CAMP Summer Intern Poster Colloquium
12 August 2021: Jovany presented a poster on his summer internship research project on “Exploring Impact on Mobility in Wildfire Impacted Areas During the COVID-19 Pandemic”.
Crystal’s presentation at the ICA Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization
6 May 2021: Dr. Crystal Bae presented work-in-progress at the Workshop on Adaptable Research Methods For Empirical Research with Map Users, co-hosted by the ICA Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization and the ICA Commission on User Experience. The talk was entitled “Designing a Web Study to Evaluate the Cognition of Movement Parameters using Static versus Dynamic Visualizations of GPS Tracks”. Video and slides are available here on the workshop page.
Evgeny’s presentation at the AAG Annual Meeting 2020
10 April 2021: Evgeny Noi presented a talk on “A decade in review (2010-2020): A comprehensive taxonomy of techniques for mapping and visualization of spatial movement.” at the “Cognition and Visualization 1” session at the AAG Annual Meeting 2021.
Jovany Cota to present at CAMP Statewide Conference
Our very own undergraduate Research Assistant, Jovany Cota, has been nominated to represent UC Santa Barbara in the statewide CAMP (California Alliance for Minority Participation) Conference on February 12th. We are excited for Jovany to share his research project on “COVID-19 Transmission and Mobility in Wildfire Impacted Areas”. The purpose of this study is to research the spread of COVID-19 in wildfire impacted areas in order to assess if the presence of a wildfire impacts the mobility patterns and transmission of COVID-19. To investigate this, Jovany compared mobility patterns in 2019 to the mobility patterns that coincided with both the COVID-19 pandemic and recent wildfires in California. Jovany is currently an undergraduate Geography Major with an Emphasis in GIS.
Somayeh was a keynote speaker at the 
