CIM welcomes Dr Yair Grinberger from Heidelberg University

Dr Yair Grinberger from GIScience Group of the Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University is visiting CIM this week (29 October to 2 November 2018) and will be giving a seminar within the WISC Seminar Series on Thursday (see details below).

Yair is based in the room B1.13 (Social Science Building) and is discussing collaborations with CIM researchers around the topics of urban analytics, time geography and digital ethnographic methods.

We warmly welcome Yair to CIM and look forward to fruitful conversations.

Extracting Knowledge on Urban Dynamics from Geo-Spatial Data - Approaching the ‘Why’ Question

Dr Yair Grinberger - Heidelberg University
Thursday 1 November 2018 from 1pm-2pm
CS 1.02 - Computer Science Building

Abstract: With the increasing integration of information and communication technologies into urban lives, cities become the object of large quantities of geo-spatial data. Researchers and practitioners use these data to research spatio-temporal urban activity and consumption patterns, i.e. answering ‘where’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ questions regarding urban dynamics. Efforts of understanding the social and spatial causes behind these patterns (i.e. ‘why’) using the same data are however scarce. This can be attributed to the relatively limited depth with which such data directly captures the nature of human and social experiences. In this talk I argue that to overcome this challenge, knowledge discovery processes and modeling efforts must better engage with theoretical conceptions originating from human geography and social sciences. To support this argument, the talk will focus on the analytical framework of time geography, showing how it can be integrated into data analysis procedures, also presenting results from its application to analyses of tourists’ mobility trajectories and of the quality of volunteered geographical information.

About the Speaker: Dr Yair Grinberger is a post-doctoral Alexander von-Humboldt fellow at the GIScience research group in the Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University. He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he also received his BA in Geography with a specialization in Geoinformatics. In his post-doctoral research, he investigates computational processes for uncovering the social and spatial processes behind the production of volunteered geographical information. His doctoral thesis focused on identifying the combined effects of physical conditions and personal perceptions on human mobility. His research interests also include modeling urban resilience to disasters, studying urban dynamics, and critical GIScience.