Graduate students Frank Davenport, Kate Deutsch, Antonio Medrano, Srinath Ravulaparthy, and Andrew Thorpe have received Dangermond Travel awards for the Winter Quarter. These travel and registration expense awards are made available thanks to the generosity of Jack and Laura Dangermond and are used to help students present GIS-related work at conferences and workshops.
Frank will be attending the Western Regional Science Association Annual Meeting (24-27 February, 2013; Santa Barbara, CA) to present “Open Trade, Price Supports, and Regional Price Behavior in Mexican Maize Markets” His presentation draws on his dissertation research and analyzes wholesale maize prices in twelve different Mexican markets from 1998-2010, a period when markets became more open to inter and intranational trade. It examines how the influence of global and local forces on Mexican maize prices changed during this period and explores how the strength of global and local forces varied across maize producing regions.
Kate will deliver a paper coauthored with Kostas Goulias, “Decision Makers and Socializers, Social Networks and the Role of Individuals as Participants,” at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (13-17 January, 2013; Washington, DC). As Kate puts it, “The inclusion of social interactions into models explaining facets of behavior is becoming recognized as a necessity in the pursuit of higher accuracy in explaining and predicting behavior. An important aspect that has been understudied however is the variability or heterogeneity of individuals both as social network members and as participants in these social networks. This research explores the differences between social network composition, and the decision roles members play within different social networks specifically when deciding where to participate in activities.”
Antonio is attending the 2013 INFORMS Computing Society Conference (5-9 January, 2013; Santa Fe, NM) to present a paper titled “New Methods for Solving the Bi-Objective Shortest Path Problem” coauthored by Rick Church. The paper “proposes a new two-stage exact algorithm for computing the unsupported nondominated solutions to a bi-objective shortest path problem. The first stage uses a gateway shortest path heuristic, which is able to efficiently compute an upper bound on the set of unsupported non-dominated solutions. The second stage uses Near Shortest Path enumeration as described in Raith and Ehrgott to converge on the exact solutions. Computational results will be presented comparing this new method to previous algorithms.”
Srinath will also be attending the TRB in Washington, DC. His paper, “Geo-locating Activities to Business Establishment Locations Using Time-Dependent Activity Assignment for Travel Demand Modeling,” adopts a new activity assignment approach that considers as input the activities predicted for each person in an activity-based microsimulation model system called SimAGENT and an inventory of business establishments provided by a commercially available database. This approach produces geo-located activities at locations of a sub-set of world business establishments enabling small area studies and micro-assignment of greenhouse gas emissions at a fine resolution to perform traffic and environmental impact studies. This method is implemented in Transportation Analysis SIMulation System (TRANSIMS) and compared to a naïve approach of assigning activities to random locations within traffic analysis zones in SimAGENT.
Andrew will attend the 2013 Annual Conference of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (24-28 March, 2013; Baltimore, MD). His paper, “Detection of methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor plumes using airborne imaging spectrometry: Potential for oil and gas industry,” discusses the importance of developing gas detection techniques for airborne sensors to better constrain local emissions and improve national greenhouse budgets. It emphasizes greenhouse emission sources of increasing concern; provides examples of natural and anthropogenic methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor plumes detected using the AVIRIS airborne sensor, including fugitive methane emissions from hydrocarbon storage tanks and oil platforms; and discusses his ongoing work to estimate gas concentrations within entire AVIRIS scenes and to quantify emission fluxes.
Note: Calls for applications for Dangermond Travel Scholarships are usually made in August (Aug. 15-22) for the Fall Quarter, December (Dec. 15-22) for the Winter Quarter, and March (Mar. 15-22) for the Spring and Summer Quarters. However, due to the early Spring timing of the AAG this year, the 2013 Spring/Summer call for applications will be made February 1, 2013.
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