Tag Archives: annual meeting

Geothink at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers

By Drew Bush

From March 29 to April 2, 2016, Geothink’s students, co-applicants, and collaborators presented their research and met with colleagues at the now concluded 2016 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. Over the week, Geothinkers gave 11 presentations, organized six sessions, chaired five sessions, and were panellists on four sessions. See who attended here.

“This year’s AAG provided a great opportunity to get geographically diverse Geothinkers together,” Victoria Fast, a recently graduated doctoral student in Ryerson University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “I can’t think of a better place for a meeting about a special journal issue on open data; there are so many fresh, uncensored ideas flying around the conference, both inside and outside of sessions.”

Of particular note for Fast was Panel Session 1475 Gender & GIScience (see her Geothink.ca guest post here). Panelists in the session included Geothink Head Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment; And, Geothink collaborator Sarah Elwood, a professor in University of Washington’s Department of Geography.

Others agreed.

“A panel on gender and GIScience was refreshing and enlightening,” Geothink Co-Applicant Scott Bell, a professor of Geography and Planning at University of Saskatchewan, wrote to Geothink.ca.

“My presentation was in a day long symposium on human dynamism,” he added. “It summarized a recently published Geothink aligned paper on human mobility tracking and active transportation (published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science). It seemed to go over pretty well, I’m glad I was in the day-long event as the room was packed most of the day.”

For others, the high cost of the location meant they couldn’t stay for a full week or attend every single session. Still they reported good turnout by members of the Geothink team.

“This year we did not organize a specific panel or panels, or specific sessions to showcase Geothink work,” wrote Geothink Co-Applicant Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law and professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. “This meant that our presentations were dispersed across a variety of different sessions, on different days of the week.”

Many Geothinkers were also intimately involved in running parts of the conference.

“This was a standout AAG for me,” wrote Geothink researcher Alexander Aylett, a professor and researcher at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, who ran three sessions (Find an overview of what Aylette’s sessions did at www.smartgreencities.org). In collaboration with Andrés Lluque-Ayla from Durham University we ran a full day of sessions on the overlap between “Smart” and “Sustainable” cities.   We had some excellent presentations—including one from fellow Geothinker Pamela Robinson—and a strong turn out throughout the whole day. (Even at 8 AM, which was a shock to me!).”

For some students, it was the first time they had attended the meeting or presented their own research.

“This was my first time at the AAG,” said Geothink Newsletter Editor, Suthee Sangiambut, a maser’s student in McGill University’s Department of Geography with Sieber. “I was quite excited to be at the event and was able to meet all kinds of geographers, all of whom had different ideas on what geography exactly is.”

“It was great to see how global events of the past years were shaping our discussions on the Geoweb, privacy, surveillance, national identity, immigration, and more,” he added. “Those at the Disrupt Geo session were able to hear perspectives from private sector and civil society sides, which was quite refreshing and is something I would like to see more of in the future.”

The AAG annual meeting has been held every year since the association’s founding in 1904. This year’s conference included more than 9,000 attendees.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca. We also want to thank Victoria Fast for her willingness to share photos from the 2016 AAG Annual Meeting.

Please find an abstract for the presentation mentioned in this article below.

Leveraging Sensor Networks to Study Human Spatial Behavior

Abstract:
In the past decade society has entered a technological period characterized by mobile and smart computing that supports input and processing from users, services, and numerous sensors. The smartphones that most of us carry in our pockets offer the ability to integrate input from sensors monitoring various external and internal sources (e.g., accelerometer, magnetometer, microphone, GPS, wireless internet, Bluetooth). These relatively raw inputs are processed on the phones to provide us with a seemingly unlimited number of applications. Furthermore, these raw inputs can be integrated and processed in ways that can offer novel representations of human behavior, both dissagregate and aggregate. As a result, new opportunities to examine and better understand human spatial behaviour are available. An application we report here involved monitoring of a group of people over an extended period of time. Monitoring is timed at relatively tightly spaced intervals (every 2 minutes). Such a research setting lends itself to both planned and natural experiments; the later of which emerge as a result of the regular and on going nature of data collection. We will report on both a natural experiment  and planned observations resulting from 3 separate implementations of our smartphone based observations. The natural experiment that emerged in the context of our most recent month-long monitoring study of 28 participants using mobile phone-based ubiquitous sensor monitoring will be our focus, but will be contextualized with related patterns from earlier studies. The implications for public health and transportation planning are discussed.

Geothink Program Guide for the American Association of Geographers (AAG) 2016 Annual Meeting

By Drew Bush

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in San Francisco, CA from March 29 to April 2.

The Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers will be in San Francisco, CA from March 29 to April 2.

A large number of Geothinkers will be presenting at this year’s American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA the last week in March. You won’t want to miss two of our co-applicants and one of our students making presentations on Tuesday in the 10:00 AM session Data in action: Tracing the open data experiment. Other highlights include Renee Sieber and Sarah Elwood as panellists in Gender & GIScience.

Below we’ve compiled the schedule for all of Geothink’s co-applicants, collaborators and students who will be presenters, panelists, organizers, and chairs during the conference. Find a PDF of this program here. We hope you find this useful for finding the right sessions to join. You can also find the full searchable preliminary AAG program here.

If you’re not able to make the conference, you can follow along on Twitter and use our list of Twitter handles below to join the conversation with our participants.

Join the Conversation on Twitter:
Alex Aylett: @openalex_                   Peter Johnson: @peterajohnson
Tenille Brown: @TenilleEBrown      Pamela Robinson: @pjrplan
Jonathan Corbett: @joncorbett      Teresa Scassa: @teresascassa
Sarah Elwood: @SarahElwood1      Renee Sieber: @RE_Sieber
Victoria Fast: @VVFast                      Suthee Sangiambut: @notgregorypeck
Sara Harrison: @Sara_Harrison79  Scott Bell: @scottyBgeo
Stéphane Roche: @Geodoc31

And remember to use the conference hashtag #AAG2016 and our hashtag #Geothink or handle @geothinkca when you Tweet.

Come to our Sessions at AAG 2015:

Tuesday, March 29

Wednesday, March 30

Thursday, March 31

Friday, April 1

Saturday, April 2

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Image Source: Zheng Zeng, Creative Commons 4.0

Geothink Program Guide for the Associaton of American Geographers (AAG) 2015 Annual Meeting

This year's American Association of Geographer's (AAG) Annual Meeting is in Chicago, Illinois.

This year’s American Association of Geographer’s (AAG) Annual Meeting is in Chicago, Illinois (Photo courtesy of AAG.org).

By Drew Bush

A long line-up of Geothinkers will be presenting at this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Chicago next week. You’ll definitely not want to miss four of our team members as panelists on Civic technology: governance, equity and inclusion considerations on Thursday at 8:00 AM. Other highlights include presentations by Geothink Principal Investigator Renee Sieber and our students including Cheryl Power and Tenille Brown.

Below we’ve compiled the schedule for all of the project’s team members, collaborators and students who will be presenters, panelists and chairs during the conference. Find a PDF of our guide here. We hope you find this useful for finding the right sessions to join. You can also find the full preliminary AAG program here.

If you’re not able to make the conference, you can follow along on Twitter and use our list of Twitter handles below to join the conversation with our participants.

Join the Conversation on Twitter
Alex Aylett: @openalex_                                    Peter Johnson: @peterajohnson
Zorica Nedovic-Budic: @TurasCities               Andrea Minano: @Andrea_Minano
Tenille Brown: @TenilleEBrown                       Claus Rinner: @ClausRinner
Jonathan Corbett: @joncorbett                       Pamela Robinson: @pjrplan
Sarah Elwood: @SarahElwood1                       Teresa Scassa: @teresascassa
Victoria Fast: @VVFast                                       Renee Sieber: @RE_Sieber
Muki Haklay: @mhaklay                                    Harrison Smith: @Ambiveillance

And remember to use the conference hashtag #AAG2015 and our hashtag #Geothink or address @geothinkca when you Tweet.

Come to our Sessions at AAG 2015

Tuesday, April 21

Wednesday, April 22

Thursday, April 23

Friday, April 24

Saturday, April 25

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Geothink ‘Meetup Montreal’

By Matthew Tenney

The Geothink Canada “meetup” took place last night (26 June 2013) that started with an overview of the grant by Professor Stéphane Roche from the Université Laval. Participants of the meetup ranged from university professors and students to city officials and representatives from Open Street Map (OSM). With such a diverse group of attendents individual interests and curiousities took the lead in guiding the evenings discussions.

A variety of topics were discussed that spotlighted both the many
troubles we will certainly face, as well as the range of benifits that could spur from such a comprehensive research initative regarding open-data and -government practices across Canada.

Topics that were covered ranged from overcoming the digital-divide,
engaging participation from marganilized communities, data-quality and provenance, and of course legal issues encompassing the dissemination of data.

Pleased by the turn out of the “meetup”, we look forward to the next one and hope to see you come out to be heard (be it in the flesh or a digital presence).