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Dr. Paul M. Torrens, Center for GIS, Department of Geographical Sciences, and UMIACS, University of Maryland |
Urban simulation as a process model within GIS
Publications are here | Project overview | Eye candy | |
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Project overview | |
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. |
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Eye candy | |
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. |
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![]() Robot motion control |
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![]() Human behavior in critical scenarios |
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![]() Modeling riots |
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A toolkit for measuring sprawl
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![]() Simulating crowd behavior |
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![]() Wi-Fi geography |
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![]() Simulating sprawl |
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