Tom Pingel was one of four graduate students from The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s member institutions to receive a UCGIS Student Paper Award. Tom presented his paper at the UCGIS Summer Assembly this month, and it was selected for the Best Paper Award by Transactions in GIS, consisting of $200 and the fast-tracking of the paper into the peer-reviewed process for publication in the journal CaGIS. Jeremy Mennis and Tim Nyerges presented the Student Paper Award to Tom; E. Lynn Usery presented him with the Best Paper Award on behalf of CaGIS.
Tom’s paper, “Modeling slope as a contributor to route selection in mountainous areas,” describes a road finding program he created that takes information about a person or a group’s known tracks and uses that to find routes or paths they might take between places: “The original idea for this, by the way, came from Tobler’s 1993 NCGIA paper ‘Non-isotropic geographic modeling.’ His transformation of slope to speed (and therefore time) has come to be known as Tobler’s Hiking Function.”
Abstract of Tom’s paper:
Slope exerts a powerful influence on the route selection processes of humans. Attempts to model human movement in hilly and mountainous terrain that have largely focused on least-time route transformations can be improved by incorporating research that suggests humans systematically overestimate slopes. Such research suggests that cost functions derived from slope should be more expensive than time derivations alone would indicate. This paper presents a method that empirically estimates cost functions for slopes. The method is then used to predict routes and paths that are more likely to be selected by humans based on their perceptions of slope. We also evaluate that method and find it successfully predicts road, track and trail locations over a variety of conditions and distances
Congratulations, Tom–keep on “tracking”!
