“Trees in the City 3: methodological innovations and applications for urban forest research” (Mike Alonzo); “Modeling Retreat of the Himalayan Gangotri Glacier” (Felicia Bill and Mark O’Connor); “Estimating irrigation in residential areas of Los Angeles using SPOT imagery” (Helen Chen); “Mapping with strings attached” (Kitty Currier); “Can Clustering Grain Price Data on Structural Characteristics Improve Spatially Explicit Forecasts for Food Insecure Markets?” (Frank Davenport); “Modeling Travel Decisions: Including the Impact of Place Attitudes on Destination Choice” (Kate Deutsch); “Spatial community detection and urban structure analysis from mobile phone data” (Song Gao); “Citation Map: visualizing the spread of scientific ideas through space and time” (Yingjie Hu); “Building a New Generation of Contextual and Personal Time Varying Accessibility Indicator” (Jay Lee); “Detecting association between a disease and an environmental factor using localized t-test” (Kevin Mwenda); “A framework for characterizing human mobility from georeferenced mobile phone data” (Yihong Yuan).
The titles above are from presentations given by UCSB students at the recent AAG Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, and not many folks over age 50 could tell you what discipline they all relate to. Admittedly, the word “map” is a broad hint to those old timers who think of Geography as simply a descriptive inventory of the earth’s surface. Today, however, “Geography is about meaning, not knowing place names and memorizing lists — that was school geography” (Daniel Edelson, vice president for education programs at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.).
“The workforce for the geospatial industry is one of the fastest-growing in the country, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Labor’s High Growth Job Training Initiative. A 30% increase in the last five years in the number of students taking Advance Placement courses and exams in the field of geography suggests that students know it, even if Mom and Dad haven’t heard that a degree in geography could be more useful than one in law or economics” (Susan Spano, “This is not the geography that you remember.” Los Angeles Times, Travel, April 7, 2013).
As befits a convention devoted to spatial relationships, “A mobile application for iOS, Android, and Blackberry was available for this year’s Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. The new smartphone application allowed attendees to search the program for sessions, events, and other pertinent conference information. Users could also receive alerts about program changes or notices. Networking features offered colleagues tools to share schedules and exchange contact information. The AAG mobile app also integrated with social media networks on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn” (source).
UCSB Geography’s presence at the AAG was impressive this year. Ten of our grads and two recent alumnae had papers or posters accepted for presentation and received Dangermond travel grants to defray expenses. Grad student Kitty Currier was given the Coastal & Marine Specialty Group’s Student Illustrated Paper Merit Award, and grad student Song Gao received an AAG International Geographic Information Fund Student Award. Professor Keith Clarke gave a presentation on the UC online pilot program for online instruction in basic cartography, and Professor Krzysztof Janowicz presented a paper on “Linked Spatiotemporal Data” at the CyberGIS Symposium. Don Janelle, Program Director for the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies, was presented with a 50 year AAG Membership Award; our Chair, Dar Roberts, was given the Outstanding Contributions Award in Remote Sensing for 2013 (see the February 26, 2013 article); and our distinguished alumna Dawn Wright received the AAG Distinguished Teaching Honors for 2012 (see the April 15 article), as well as the AAG Coastal & Marine Geography Specialty Group’s 2013 R.J. Russell Award, the highest award given by this group. Daddy would be proud, even if he doesn’t have a clue about remote sensing or GIS!
Article by Bill Norrington
