GIScience

The main goal of the AMU Invited Lectures Series in GIScience is to present current problems and achievements in Geographical Information Science (GIScience), which are being worked on by scientists of Polish origin and have achieved international scientific success in this field.

GIScience is a young scientific discipline among geographic sciences, searching for its identity both in science and in professional practice. The lecture series will be a kind of continuation of the XI International Conference on GIScience, which was organized by the Department of Geoinformation of the Institute of Geoecology and Geoinformation in Poznan online on 27-30 September 2021.

Among the invited lecturers are six GIScience researchers who are successfully developing this scientific discipline:

Prof. Arika Ligmann-Zielinska is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Her areas of research include applying spatial modeling to study social systems, contributing to modeling methodology, and teaching spatial thinking through models. To date, her core research has focused on sensitivity analysis of model output which reveals which model inputs contribute most to outcome variability. Prof. Ligmann-Zielinska is an international expert in agent-based modeling which she uses to study coupled human and natural systems, urban health systems, and land use and land cover change. She is developer of various spatially explicit agent-based models that capture the dynamic relationship between human decision making and the environment with focus on generative and exploratory role of modeling that allows to build scenarios and examine/visualize complex system characteristics such as the interrelationships between societies and their landscapes, the dependence of system trajectories on human decisions made in the past, and the decision-making diversity. Thus far she published over 70 manuscripts in international journals and edited books. Her instructorship includes both undergraduate and graduate courses in GIS, geocomputation, and complex systems modeling. It is worth noting that Prof. Ligmann-Zielinska is a graduate of geography studies at our Faculty of Geographical and Geological Sciences (1998, supervisor Prof. Daniela Sołowiej) and a PhD student at the San Diego State University/University of California Santa Barbara (2008, supervisor Prof. Piotr Jankowski - currently a visiting professor at AMU).

  • H Yang, A Ligmann-Zielinska, Y Dou, MG Chung, J Zhang, J Liu, 2022. Complex effects of telecouplings on forest dynamics: an agent-based modeling approach, Earth Interactions 26 (1), 15-27.
  • Ligmann-Zielinska A, Jing Du E, Rivers III L, Liverpool-Tasie S, Denny R.C, 2020. Principles of Participatory Ensemble Modeling to Study Complex Socioecological Systems, Innovations in collaborative modeling, 3-28.
  • A Ligmann-Zielinska, PO Siebers, N Magliocca, DC Parker, V Grimm, 2020. ‘One size does not fit all’: a roadmap of purpose-driven mixed-method pathways for sensitivity analysis of agent-based models, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 23 (1).

Dr. Katarzyna Sila-Nowicka is a Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information Science in the School of Environment, Auckland, New Zealand. She was previously a Research Associate in Urban Methods, Modelling and Simulations at the Urban Big Data Centre at University of Glasgow. She has a PhD in Geoinformatics from the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. Her research interests cover a wide range of areas in GISc, Urban Studies, Geodesy and Cartography including spatial analysis, statistics and spatial modelling, urban planning and remote sensing. The focus of her GIScience and urban analytics research interests lie in developing spatiotemporal analytics and modelling techniques to study and understand movement. Understanding human movement and its relationship to the urban and natural environment has crucial implications for studying modern global concerns and phenomena such as spread of diseases, traffic intensity, environmental exposure, human mobility and accessibility to services, geoprivacy, natural hazards and migration. Her current and future research will contribute to understanding and solving these problems by advancing the knowledge of human movements and its dynamic relations with the environment. It is worth noting that Dr. Sila-Nowicka is a graduate at the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences.

  • K Smolak, K Siła-Nowicka, JC Delvenne, M Wierzbiński, W Rohm, 2021. The impact of human mobility data scales and processing on movement predictability. Scientific Reports 11 (1), 1-10.
  • X Zhang, J Yao, K Sila-Nowicka, C Song, 2021. Geographic concentration of industries in Jiangsu, China: a spatial point pattern analysis using micro- geographic data. The Annals of Regional Science 66 (2), 439-461.
  • PV Thakuriah, K Sila-Nowicka, J Hong, C Boididou, M Osborne, C Lido, 2020. Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD): a composite survey and sensing approach to understanding urban living and mobility. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 80, 101427.

Prof. Martin Swobodzinski is an Assistant Professor in Department of Geography at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA. He is an empiricist who subscribes to the scientific method and inductive reasoning, with an emphasis on experimentation and human subject testing. He has a long-standing interest in spatial cognition, an interdisciplinary field of research concerned with the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of spatial knowledge that informs human behavior. He also has substantial training in applied computer science, which provides for a focus on methodological, analytical, and computational aspects in my work. The overarching theme of his research is the investigation of technology as it mediates the spatial behavior, reasoning, and choice making of individual human beings. It is worth noting that Prof. Swobodzinski is a graduate of geoinformatics at Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität (2006, Muenster, Germany) and a PhD student at the San Diego State University/University of California Santa Barbara (2012, supervisor Prof. Piotr Jankowski - currently a visiting professor at AMU).

  • Swobodzinski, M. and Harrell, K. (2022). Spatial patterns, utility, and limitations of volunteered reports of urban homeless campsites in Portland, Oregon; The Professional Geographer 74.
  • Swobodzinski, M., Maruyama, M., and Mankowski, E. (2021). Methodological and institutional considerations for the use of 360-degree video and pet animals in human subject research: An experimental case study from the United States. Behavior Research Methods, 53: 977–992.
  • AT Parker, M Swobodzinski, JD Wright, K Hansen, B Morton, E Schaller, 2021. Wayfinding Tools for People With Visual Impairments in Real-World Settings: A Literature Review of Recent Studies. Frontiers in Education, 424.

Prof. Tomasz F. Stepinski is a Thomas Jefferson Chair Professor of Space Exploration in the Department of Geography and School of Computing Sciences and Informatics at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. His present research concentration as follows: 1) Geodemographics and spatial search – Content-based visual search of large spatial datasets. Query and retrieval of locations sharing similar “sense of place.” Continental-scale land cover change dynamics, regionalization, geodemographics, racial segregation, spatial complexity. 2) Computational geomorphometry: Geomorphons – novel approach to delineation of landform elements. Delineation and classification of drainage networks. Auto-generation of physiographic maps. Discovering drivers of incision density. 3) Automated analysis of spatial data: Machine cataloging of impact craters on Mars and the Moon. Deriving mineralogical maps on Mars from hyperspectral images. It is worth noting that Prof. Stepinski is a graduate in astrophysics at the Warsaw University (1979).

  • P Netzel, TF Stepinski, 2022. Segmentation of global climate dataset into contiguous spatial units having quantitatively homogeneous climates. International Journal of Climatology.
  • M Saeedimoghaddam, TF Stepinski, 2021. Multiplicative random cascade models of multifractal urban structures. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 569, 125767.
  • M Saeedimoghaddam, TF Stepinski, 2020. Automatic extraction of road intersection points from USGS historical map series using deep convolutional neural networks. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 34 (5), 947-968.

Prof. Agnieszka Leszczynski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. She is a digital geographer and geographic information scientist. She is an academic researcher and educator interested in digital location (geolocation), big data, platforms, and cities. Her current work examines two contemporary phenomena: the political economies of digital location data and technologies and the platform economy in cities. Her current projects examine digital platforms in Canadian cities, and location-based technology startups in the digital economy. She currently interested in digital geographies, platforms and cities, digital location/geolocation, GIScience & Society. She is editor of the journal Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice. She was co-editor Big Data & Society, the flagship journal for interdisciplinary social science engagements with big data and related phenomena, and also serves on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Transactions in GIS, the Journal of Spatial Information Science, and The Canadian Geographer.

  • Leszczynski A and Elwood S., 2022. Glitch epistemologies for computational cities. Dialogues in Human Geography.
  • Leszczynski A and Kong V., 2022. Walking (with) the platform: bikesharing and the aesthetics of gentrification in Vancouver. Urban Geography.
  • Leszczynski A and Kong V., 2022. Gentrification and the an/aesthetics of digital spatial capital inCanadian ‘platform cities’. The Canadian Geographer 66(1): 8-22.

Dr. Monica Wachowicz is an Associate Dean of Geospatial Science Research Leader Space Industry Hub and Deputy Director of Sir Lawrence Wackett Defence & Aerospace Centre at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is a world- renowned expert in Geospatial Data Science, with a unique multidisciplinary background in Geomatics Engineering, Geography, and Computer Science. Her research interests are: machine learning on graphs, TinyML, streaming analytics, geospatial intelligence, smart cities, digital twins, Internet of Things, edge computing, and edge artificial intelligence. She specializes in machine learning to analyze data streams from the Internet of Things, with the purpose of identifying opportunities and challenges in building sustainable smart cities. She has collaborated in research projects with many high technology companies, such as IBM, Cisco, Orange Communications, ESRI and Siemens, as well as academics from the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe. She has over 300 publications and 50 invited talks and keynote speeches at the United Nations, GIScience Conference and Big Data Congress. Her pioneering work in multidisciplinary teams from government, industry and research organizations is fostering the next generation of data scientists for innovation in green economies.

  • Black, K. and Wachowicz, M. (2021). Clustering Spatio-Temporal Kpartite Graphs for Finding Crowdsourcing Communities in IoMT Networks. Big Earth Data Journal, Volume 5(1), 24-48.
  • Li, S. Wachowicz, M. and Fan, H. (2021), Special Issue on Analytics of Big Geosocial Media and Crowdsourcing Data. Big Earth Data Journal, 5(1).
  • Parise, A., Manso-Callejo, A.M., Cao, H. and Wachowicz M. (2021). Prophet model for forecasting occupancy presence in indoor spaces using non- intrusive sensors. AGILE GIScience Ser., 2, 9.