Craig Robson made the trip to Vienna for the 8th GIScience conference, hosted by the Technical University of Vienna (TU). This four day conference, showcasing some of the leading research in the science of geographic information, consisted of a day of workshops and three days of presentations, a poster session and a panel session. Sessions covered a whole host of topics from work related to landcover/use, use and issues of user generated data, spatial analysis and many other areas (see here for programme). The varied nature of the session themes highlights not only the interdisciplinary aspect to the conference, but also the GI science field in which we find ourselves in.
During the conference a number of talks were of particular interest, including a talk on “Detecting Origin-Destination Mobility Flows From Geotagged Tweets in Greater Los Angeles Area”, which talked about how using tweets from twitter commuting patterns could be mapped for a large area, such as Los Angeles, similar work to that done by Neil Harris for Tyne and Wear (a precursor to the work Craig was presenting). As well as this a talk on how we can map population distributions, using mobile phone call data, where it is possible to map the shift between weekdays and weekends as well as during holiday periods of the population distributions. The talk used an area of northern France as an example, including Paris, where significant trends, such as shift away from Paris and towards the coast could be seen for example at weekends during the summer as well an increase around tourist locations such as Disneyland Paris. There are too many talks which were of interest to go through, though tracks of particular note included those on Spatial Analysis as well as the key note sessions, with all three providing insights into a different are of GIScience (speakers were Herbert Edelsbrunner, Renee Sieber and Jason Dykes).
Below, the location for the conference dinner, the Rathaus (the city town hall), a splendid surround showing off the history and culture of the host city (even if it did have the Roncalli circus outside).
Craig himself presented a poster on research undertaken with Neil Harris (with the supervision of Dr Stuart Barr and Phil James) on the spatial and temporal dynamics of critical infrastructures when exposed to perturbations. The poster, the extended abstract and an example failure video are available at/through the above link, or the video can be found directly here.
This was the first of two conferences Craig was attending in Vienna, the second being the second conference on Next Generation Infrastructure, for which a number of staff and fellow students joined him for. A post on this conference will shortly follow.
