2015 Summer Specialist Meeting

 

 

Representing Human Dynamics with Big Data, Social Media, and Social Networks in Hyperlocal Contexts

Hosted by the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA)
NSF-CDI and NSF-IBSS Project
August 11-12, 2015 in San Diego, California, USA

 

     This specialist meeting (workshop) is co-funded by two National Science Foundation (NSF) projects (#1416509, IBSS: Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social Networks and #1028177, CDI-Type II: Mapping Cyberspace to Realspace: Visualizing and Understanding the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Global Diffusion of Ideas and the Semantic Web). The goal of this workshop is to foster the multidisciplinary collaboration in related research disciplines, including geography, linguistics, computer science, political science, public health, and communication. The two-day workshop (August 11 and August 12, 2015), organized by the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) at San Diego State University, will bring together over 30 specialists drawn from many disciplines. The workshop will assess the current state of the art technologies and tools, identify and prioritize a research agenda, and begin the development of a research community of collaborating scholars working on these big data and social media issues.

     Over 35 specialists and scholars will be invited by the joint NSF project team, consisting of PI Ming-Hsiang Tsou (Geography) and Co-PIs from both projects: Dipak Gupta (Political Science), Jean Mark Gawron (Linguistics), Brian Spitzberg (Communication), Li An (Geography), Heather Corliss (Public Health), Jay Lee (Geography, Kent State), Ruoming Jin (Computer Science, Kent State), Xinyue Ye (Geography, Kent State), and Xuan Shi (Geosciences, U of Arkansas). The meeting will include plenary presentations by invited experts, lightning talks, and focus group discussion of the issues. This workshop will generate a final report to be published on the IBSS project website. This year, our research theme will be “Representing Human Dynamics with Big Data, Social Media, and Social Networks in Hyperlocal Contexts”. The dynamic supply of big data from millions of social media messages, GPS tracks, medical records, wireless sensors, electronic health records, web pages, and cellular phones, becomes an important research domain today. Big data provide untapped potentials for discovering and analyzing dynamic human problems, including business analytics, disease outbreaks, traffic patterns, urban dynamics, bioinformatics, and environmental changes. Such data offer golden opportunities for scientists to develop new tools, new methods, and new theories. However, Big Data Science requires transdisciplinary collaboration and research methodologies to integrate multiple perspectives into collaborative research endeavors. This workshop will build a collaborative platform for scientists and researchers to work together. Specific research questions to be addressed in the workshop may include:

  1. What are the unique characteristics of big data and social media in the context of hyperlocal human dynamics?
  2. How can we analyze non-normal probability distributions and dynamic patterns of big data, social media, and social networks from a spatiotemporal perspective?
  3. What type of innovative research frameworks can help us to collect, analyze, visualize and predict hyperlocal human dynamics using social media and big data?
  4. What are the limitations of traditional GIS database and spatial statistics in analyzing big data and social media?
  5. To what extent, and how, should theory and/or hypothesis-testing drive big data, or big data drive theory--what is the role of theory in relation to big data?
  6. To what extent can social network analyses yield (dis)confirming results in regard to theory?
  7. Given time-series and potential nonlinearity of spatial data (big data), what statistical methods, measures or statistics can be developed and/or used to "dig out" the space-time pattern(s) in human dynamics, and describe/characterize/explain/predict such patterns?

     The workshop participants will be invited by the CDI and IBSS project PI and Co-PIs. The NSF projects will cover participants’ travel and lodging costs (but no stipends). Invitees are required to submit a two page resume (biosketch, NSF style) and a two page position papers for related topics.

 

2015NSF-HDMA-workshop-new

 

PI, Co-PIs, and Senior Personnel:

• Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou (Principle Investigator, NSF-IBSS and NSF-CDI, Geography at SDSU) bio  slides: GeoViewer and SMART Dashboard
• Dr. Brian H. Spitzberg (Co-PI, NSF-IBSS and NSF-CDI, Communication at SDSU) bio  slides: Annual Report, M3D Model
• Dr. Jean Mark Gawron (Co-PI, NSF-IBSS and NSF-CDI, Linguistics at SDSU) bio  slides: Location Ontology, Factionalization
• Dr. Dipak K. Gupta (Co-PI, NSF-CDI, Political Science at SDSU) bio
• Dr. Li An (Senior Personnel, NSF-CDI, Geography at SDSU) bio
• Dr. Heather Corliss (Senior Personnel, NSF-IBSS, Public Health at SDSU) bio  slides: Communication in Public Health
• Dr. Jay Lee (Co-PI, NSF-IBSS, Geography at Kent State) bio   slides: Modeling Diffusion Processes,  Toolkit Development
• Dr. Michael Peddecord (Graduate School of Public Health at SDSU, HDMA) bio 
• Dr. Calvin Jung (HDMA at SDSU) bio 
• Dr. Ruoming Jin (Co-PI, NSF-IBSS, Computer Science at Kent State) bio   slides: KSU Updates
• Dr. Xinyue Ye (Senior Personnel, NSF-IBSS, Geography at Kent State) bio   slides: Modeling Diffusion Processes,  Toolkit Development
• Dr. Xuan Shi (Senior Personnel, NSF-IBSS, Geosciences at U of Arkansas) bio   paper  slides: Research at UARK, HPC for Big Data

 

Participant List:

CDI Project National Visiting Committee Members

Dr. Shih-Lung Shaw (Geography at University of Tennessee) bio
Dr. Edna Reid (Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University) bio
Mr. Clay Fink (Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University ) bio   paper   slides

 

IBSS Project National Visiting Committee Members

Dr. Daniel Sui (Geography, Ohio State University)  bio   paper
Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd (Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, Canada)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Jeannette N. Sutton (Communications at University of Kentucky)  bio   paper
Dr. John Brownstein (Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School) bio 

 

Invited

Dr. Lilian Weng (Data Scientist at Dropbox, Inc)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Leslie Servi (Decision Analysis Group at MITRE Corporation) bio   paper
Dr. Feng Chen (Computer Science at SUNY Albany)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Kyounghee (Hazel) Kwon (Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University) bio   paper   slides
Dr. May Yuan (GIScience at University of Texas)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Kerk F. Kee (Communication Studies at Chapman University)  bio   paper
Dr. Susan Woodruff (Social Work at SDSU) bio 
Dr. Mark Reed (Social Work at SDSU) bio   paper   slides
Dr. Atsushi Nara (HDMA, Geography at SDSU) bio   paper   slides
Dr. Eric Buhi (HDMA, Public Health at SDSU) bio 
Dr. Jeff Johnson (Epidemiology Unit, County of San Diego)  bio
Dr. Lourdes Martinez (HDMA, Communications at SDSU)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Joseph Gibbons (HDMA, Department of Sociology at SDSU)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Susan M. Kiene (Global Health at SDSU)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Caroline Thompson (Public Health at SDSU)  bio   paper   slides
Dr. Rob Malouf (Linguistics at SDSU) bio   paper   slides
Dr. John Ayers (Computational Epidemiologist, SDSU) bio 
Dr. Melody K. Schiaffino (Public Health at SDSU)  bio   paper   slides
Ms. Leslie Ray (Senior Epidemiologist at County of San Diego HHS) bio 

 

HDMA Center Research Team

Su Han (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Chris Allen (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Elias Issa (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Jessica Dozier (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Alexjandra Coronado (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Yi-Ting Chuang (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Vaishali Doshi (HDMA, Graduate student at SDSU)
Shameem Heetun (Graduate student at SDSU)
Jay Yang (HDMA,Graduate student at SDSU)
Bowei Xue (Graduate student at U of Arkansas)
Haoran Sun (Graduate student at Kent State University)
Sagar Jha (Graduate student at Kent State University)