The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The Geographical magazine, which is the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, run an article about “the future of mapping“. The piece was written by Katie Burton, and it covers a range of recent developments in mapping technologies. I was interviewed for the piece, and provided information about our work with Sapelli, and also comments … Continue reading Geographical magazine: The Future of Mapping
Continue reading »This blog post was written by Michelle Neil of ACSA with edits by me (yay! collaborative note taking!) (apologies for getting names wrong!) The session was structured in the following way: first, each person presented their issue, and then they answer questions that were presented by other panel members. The questions that we managed to … Continue reading Citizen Science 2019: Designing technology to maximize cultural diversity, uptake, and outcomes of citizen science
Continue reading »About a year ago, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, hosted the PPGIS 2017 workshop (here are my notes from the first day and the second day). Today, four papers from the workshop were published in the journal Quaestiones Geographicae which was established in 1974 as an annual journal of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological … Continue reading Papers from PPGIS 2017 meeting: state of the art and examples from Poland and the Czech Republic
Continue reading »The first outcome of the December 2016 workshop on apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects was the open access paper “Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science“, which came out in October 2017. The workshop, which was organised by Soledad Luna and Ulrike Sturm from the Berlin Museum for Natural History, has … Continue reading Developing mobile applications for environmental and biodiversity citizen science: considerations and recommendations
Continue reading »The Digital Geographies Research Group of the RGS-IBG held the annual symposium at the University of Sheffield, under the theme “Justice and the Digital”. These are partial notes from the day The symposium opening session focus on the important question “What’s Justice got to do with it?” Jeremy Crampton covered three issues – practices of surveillance in the context … Continue reading Justice and the Digital symposium notes
Continue reading »A few weeks ago, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), published an update for the report from 2014 on the use of crowdsourced geographic information in government. The 2014 report was very successful – it has been downloaded almost 1,800 times from 41 countries around the world in about 3 years (with more … Continue reading Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government
Continue reading »The context of the workshop and the notes from the first part of the workshop is available here. The theme of the second part of the day was Interacting with geographical citizen science: lessons learned from urban environments Volunteer interactions with flood crowdsourcing platforms – Avi Baruch talk is based on a completed PhD on the aspects of volunteers … Continue reading Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Afternoon session
Continue reading »On the 27th April, UCL hosted a workshop on the “Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science“. The workshop description was as follows: “A decade ago, in 2007, Michael Goodchild defined volunteered geographic information (VGI) as ‘the widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal … Continue reading Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Morning session
Continue reading »The first week of the “Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing” course was dedicated to an introduction to the field of citizen science using the history, examples and typologies to demonstrate the breadth of the field. The second week was dedicated to the second half of the course name – crowdsourcing in general, and its … Continue reading Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 2 – Google Local Guides
Continue reading »In December 2016, ECSA and the Natural History Museum in Berlin organised a workshop on analysing apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects. Now, the report from the workshop has evolved into an open peer review paper on RIO Journal. RIO is worth noticing: is “The Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal” and what … Continue reading Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science
Last weekend, I updated my Linkedin page to indicate that I’ve now completed the move between departments at UCL – from the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering to the Department of Geography. It’s not just me – the Extreme Citizen Science group will be now based at the Department of Geography. With this move, … Continue reading Changing departments – the pros and cons of being away from home discipline(s)
Once you switch the smartphone off from email and social media network, you can notice better when and how you’re crowdsourced. By this, I mean that use of applications to contribute data is sometimes clearer as the phone becomes less of communication technology and more of information technology (while most of the time it is … Continue reading Crowdsourced: navigation & location-based services
The second day of the PPGIS 2017 symposium (see Day 1 here) started with a session on METHODS AND TOOLS. The session opened with a keynote from Peter Nijkamp (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland) . The talk is titled “A big data dashboard architecture for computable intelligent city policy“. Peter noted that the … Continue reading PPGIS 2017 – Poznan, Poland (Day 2) – Geodesign, applications and discussion
These notes are from the workshop Modern Methods and Tools for Public Participation in Urban Planning 2017, held in Palac Obrzycko near Poznan, Poland on 22nd and 23rd June 2017 – the outline of the workshop stated “Researchers and practitioners of urban planning have had a variable interest in developing and applying methods of public participation … Continue reading PPGIS 2017 – Poznan, Poland (Day 1) – different notions and tools of public participation GIS
Last December, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) awarded funding to UCL Extreme Citizen Science group and Earthwatch as part of their investment in public engagement. The projects are all short – they start from January to March and included public engagement and training to early career researchers. “Into the Night” highlights the importance of light … Continue reading Into the night – training day on citizen science slides
As part of the AAG 2015 conference, Bandana Kar, Rina Ghose, Renee Sieber and I organised a set of sessions on Public Participation GIS – you can read the summary here. After the conference, we’ve organised a special issue of the Cartographic Journal (thanks to Alex Kent, the journal editor) dedicated to current perspectives of public participation … Continue reading Public Participation GIS and Participatory GIS in the Era of GeoWeb – editorial for a special issue
The EveryAware book provided an opportunity to communicate the results of a research that Dr Charlene Jennett led, together with two Masters students: Joanne (Jo) Summerfield and Eleonora (Nora) Cognetti, with me as an additional advisor. The research was linked to the EveryAware, since Nora explored the user experience of WideNoise, the citizen science noise monitoring … Continue reading New paper: Usability and interaction dimensions of participatory noise and ecological monitoring
The main Esri User conference starts with a plenary day, where all the participants (16,000 of them) join together for a set of presentation from 8:30 to 3:30 (with some breaks, of course). Below you’ll find some notes that I took during the day: The theme of the keynote was GIS – Enabling a Smarter … Continue reading Esri User Conference 2016 – plenary day
I’ve been working with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) since 1988. During the first 2 years, I wasn’t even aware that what we were doing was GIS – it was a mapping/inventory system that run on second generation PC (80286 processors) and was used to map facilities. Once I’ve discovered that this was a GIS, the … Continue reading Esri Education Conference 2016 – day 1
The slides below are from my keynote talk at the Esri Education User Conference 2016. The conference focused on creativity and its relevant to education and the utilisation of GIS (especially Esri software) at different levels of education. My talk explored the area of citizen science and extreme citizen science and the way geographical technologies … Continue reading Esri Education User Conference talk: Citizen Science & Geographical Technologies: creativity, learning, and engagement
These are the slides from my talk at the Algorithmic Governance workshop (for which there are lengthy notes in the previous post). The workshop explored the many ethical, legal and conceptual issues with the transition to Big Data and algorithm based decision-making. My contribution to the discussion is based on previous thoughts on environmental information … Continue reading Algorithmic governance in environmental information (or how technophilia shape environmental democracy)
We have a new scholarship opening at the Extreme Citizen Science group for a PhD student who will research in Human Computer Interaction and Spatial Data Quality for Online Civic Engagement. The studentship is linked and contextualised by the European Union H2020 funded project, WeGovNow! . This project will focus on the use of digital technologies for effectively … Continue reading New PhD Opportunity: Human Computer Interaction and Spatial Data Quality for Online Civic Engagement
The winter edition of Esri ArcNews (which according to Mike Gould of Esri, is printed in as many copies as Forbes) includes an article on the activities of the Extreme Citizen Science group in supporting indigenous groups in mapping. The article highlights the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) aspects of the work, and mentioning many members of … Continue reading Extreme Citizen Science in Esri ArcNews
Following the ECSA meeting, the Data & tools working group workshop was dedicated to progressing the agenda on data & infrastructure. Jaume Piera (chair, Data and Tools working group of ECSA) covered the area of citizen science data – moving from ideas, to particular solutions, to global proposals – from separate platforms (iNaturalist, iSpot, GBIF, … Continue reading Citizen Science Data & Service Infrastructure
There are several applications that allow creating forms rapidly – such as Open Data Kit (ODK) or EpiCollect. Now, there is another offering from Esri, in the form of Survey123 app – which is explained in the video below. Survey123 is integrated into ArcGIS Online, so you need an ArcGIS account to use it (you … Continue reading Esri survey123 tool – rapid prototyping geographical citizen science tool
The GIS Research UK conferences (GISRUK) are the annual gathering of the GIScience research community in the UK. While I have missed the last two (including the current one in Leeds), I have contributed to two papers that are presented in the conference. The first, ‘Participatory mapping for transformation: multiple visual representation of foodscapes and environment … Continue reading GISRUK 2015 papers: participatory mapping in Nairobi and mobile apps for Earthquake and Fire
In 2011-2012, together with Richard Treves, I was awarded a Google Faculty Research Award, and we were lucky to work with Paolo Battino for about a year, exploring how to use Google Earth tours for educational aims. The details of the projects and some reports from the project are available on Richard’s blog, who was leading … Continue reading New paper: Footprints in the sky – using student track logs in Google Earth to enhance learning
At the request of Diana Sinton, the Executive Director of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), I gave the seminar talk about the linkage between Geographic Information Science and Citizen Science. A detailed description of the talk and the slides are available here. The webinar announcement is at http://ucgis.org/ucgis-webinars/geographic-information-citizen-science-reciprocal-opportunities. The webinar was recorded, so … Continue reading UCGIS webinar [Geographic information | Citizen] Science: reciprocal opportunities
Yesterday, Tenille Brown led a Twitter discussion as part of the Geothink consortium. Tenille opened with a question about liability and wrongful acts that can harm others First off we can look at the definition of “torts”- a tort refers to a wrongful act which results in injury to another person, etc #geothink — Tenille E. […]
A citizens observatory is a concept that evolved at EU policy circles, defining the combination of participatory community monitoring, technology and governance structures that are needed to monitor/observe/manage an environmental issue. About two years ago, the EU FP7 funded 5 citizens observatory projects covering areas from water management to biodiversity monitoring. A meeting at Brussels was […]
The Association of American Geographers is coordinating an effort to create an International Encyclopedia of Geography. Plans started in 2010, with an aim to see the 15 volumes project published in 2015 or 2016. Interestingly, this shows that publishers and scholars are still seeing the value in creating subject-specific encyclopedias. On the other hand, the weird […]
Once upon a time, Streetmap.co.uk was one of the most popular Web Mapping sites in the UK, competing successfully with the biggest rival at the time, Multimap. Moreover, it was ranked second in The Daily Telegraph list of leading mapping sites in October 2000 and described at ‘Must be one of the most useful services on […]
During the symposium “The Future of PGIS: Learning from Practice?” which was held at ITC-University of Twente, 26 June 2013, I gave a talk titled ‘Keeping the spirit alive’ – preservations of participatory GIS values in the Geoweb, which explored what was are the important values in participatory GIS and how they translate to the […]
CHI 2013 and GeoHCI workshop highlighted to me the importance of understanding media for maps. During CHI, the ‘Paper Tab’ demonstration used E-Ink displays to demonstrate multiple displays interaction. I found the interactions non-intuitive and not mapping very well to what you would expect to do with paper, so a source for confusion – especially […]
As I’ve noted in the previous post, I have just attended CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference for the first time. It’s a fairly big conference, with over 3000 participants, multiple tracks that evolved over the 30 years that CHI have been going, including the familiar paper presentations, panels, posters and courses, but also the less familiar […]
CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) is the premier conference in the calendar of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. While the first paper that deal with geographic technologies within this conference was presented in 1991 (it was about User Interfaces for Geographic Information Systems by Andrew Frank and presented at a special interest group meeting), geography did not received much attention […]
The Consumers’ Association Which? magazine is probably not the first place to turn to when you look for usability studies. Especially not if you’re interested in computer technology – for that, there are sources such as PC Magazine on the consumer side, and professional magazines such as Interactions from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human […]
It is always nice to announce good news. Back in February, together with Richard Treves at the University of Southampton, I submitted an application to the Google’s Faculty Research Award program for a grant to investigate Google Earth Tours in education. We were successful in getting a grant worth $86,883 USD. The project builds on […]
At the beginning of May, I gave a lecture at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) seminar titled ‘Interacting with Geospatial Technologies – Overview and Research Challenges’. The talk was somewhat similar to the one that I gave at the BCS Geospatial SIG. However, I was trying to answer a question that I was asked during […]
The G3 Project, is a new project led by Claire Ellul and Kate Jones and funded by the JISC geospatial working group. The project’s aim is to create an interactive online mapping tutorial system for students in areas that are not familiar with GIS such as urban design, anthropology and environmental management. The project can […]