Next-generation geospatial information technologies are becoming more and more tightly interwoven with process models that can animate the dynamics and complex phenomenology that underpin geography. In some instances, we can develop incredibly realistic replicas of entire systems in computer models. Our work in this area is particularly focused on urban simulation, and the interface between humans and their social and built surroundings in city settings.

GIS have traditionally transcended the complexity of the world by simplifying its intricacies. Like maps, GIS are an abstraction of a much more complicated reality, and one of their huge success stories has been in supporting myriad explorative schemes atop that abstraction. Nevertheless, partly because of their origins in digital cartography, GIS have developed a reliance on static representation of the world that is increasingly out-of-place with the floods of data that now capture, measure, and frame phenomena as they unfold around us. Our research is focused on many diverse aspects of building a next-generation of GIS and cyberinfrastructure that integrates process models, i.e., computer models that represent the dynamic drivers of physical, human, social, environmental, and cyber-systems from their constituent components, often in ways that course across their boundaries. These functioning of these models relies heavily upon intertwining GIS and cyberinfrastructure into their computational substrate.

The image above shows the three-dimensional interface for our testbed simulation platform, in Salt Lake City, UT. The volumetric model is fully-integrated into the simulation infrastructure (see how we use this to build earthquake simulations and crowd models), and it is interwoven with underlying network, graph, and GIS data models.

Massive ice CA

Spatiotemporal GIS

Urban simulation in GIS

Big data movement analytics

Land indicators of climate

High-performance computing and networking for geosimulation

Earthquake models

Ice-sheet modeling

Dynamic physics for built infrastructure

Moving agents through space and time

Validating agent-based models

Machine-learning behavioral geography

Accelerating agent-based models

Megacity futures

Immersive modeling

Space-time GIS and analysis

A toolkit for measuring sprawl

Modeling time, space, and behavior