2nd Spatial Data Science Symposium (SDSS 2021)

Date and Time
Location
online via Airmeet
Photo of Santa Barbara coast

December 1314, 2021 | SDSS 2021 Website | Airmeet Event Invitation

Motivation

Spatial and temporal thinking is important because everything happens at some places and at some time, and understanding where and when things happen help us analyze how and why they happened or will happen. Spatial data science is concerned with the representation, modeling, and simulation of spatial processes, as well as with the publication, retrieval, reuse, integration, and analysis of spatial data. It generalizes and unifies research from fields such as geographic information science/geoinformatics, geo/spatial statistics, remote sensing, environmental studies, and transportation studies, and fosters applications of methods developed in these fields to other disciplines ranging from social to physical sciences.

Data-driven methods, such as machine learning models, have been attracting attention from the Geoscience community for the past several years. For instance, they have been successfully used to quantify semantics of place types, to classify geo-tagged images, to predict traffic and air quality, to improve resolution of remotely sensed images, and among others so on. In contrast to non-spatial information, geospatial information may be vague, uncertain, heterogeneous, and multimodal; thus spatial and temporal thinking should be included in techniques such as deep neural networks. For example, there are many questions to be explored: Whether a larger amount of data can compensate for the lack of spatial and temporal thinking; how large a role spatial and temporal thinking play in such data-driven methods; how to integrate data-driven methods with theory-driven methods, such as agent-based modelling; how to represent spatial and temporal knowledge to facilitate efficient reasoning; and how to take spatial uncertainty into the model.

With these questions in mind, the Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara plans to host the 2nd Spatial Data Science Symposium virtually this year with a focus on “Spatial and Temporal Thinking in Data-Driven Methods.” The symposium aims to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to discuss experiences, insights, methodologies, and applications, taking spatial and temporal knowledge into account while addressing their domain-specific problems. The format of this symposium will be a combination of keynotes, scientific sessions, as well as paper presentations. We welcome submissions for both papers and sessions (see below).