Upcoming Event: 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)

Readers of my blog know that I have been attending the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) for the past two years. While these meetings took place in some of the largest and most international cities in the USA (New York in 2012 and Los Angeles in 2013), the AAG decided to hold the 2014 meeting in Tampa, FL. There’s nothing wrong with this – I love Florida and it should be nice and warm there in early April – but I can’t help but be a little afraid that the city will be more or less overrun by geographers over the course of the conference week. Also, there seem to be mostly two types of accommodation in Tampa: either luxury hotels that break my budget (even at the “discounted conference rate” of USD 199 per night in select hotels) or shady motels far away from the conference venue…

Anyways, enough with the rant, I’m really and honestly looking forward to the conference. Here are the details:

2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)
Conference Dates: April 8 to 12, 2014
Conference Venue: Tampa Convention Center
Conference Website

Also, this year I will be presenting a paper we’re currently writing in the course of a joint research project with our colleagues at the Center for Spatial Information Science (CSIS) at the University of Tokyo. Here are some details:

Konstantin Greger*, Yuji Murayama
Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Bicycle Commuting Behavior in the Greater Tokyo Area Using a Micro-Scale Persontrip Database

Compared to other nations, the share of motorized individual traffic in the daily commuting flows in Japan is rather low. Instead, the share of railway transportation is significantly higher. In addition, this generates feeding traffic from homes and workplaces to and from the stations, which is done mostly on foot or by bike. This holds especially true for highly urbanized areas, such as the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area with its 34 million inhabitants, which we use as a study area in this paper.

Here we investigate the role and structure of the use of bicycles in the course of commuting traffic. This paper provides a thorough spatio-temporal analysis of bicycle behavior, since we analyze how bicycles are used in the daily commutes, by whom, and where. We investigate how bicycles are integrated in the commuting process and what spatial factors determine the use of bicycles.

For this paper we employ a massive micro scale person trip database provided by the Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo. It contains sociodemographic data about approximately 600,000 sample individuals, as well as information about the purpose of each of their trips, their chosen means of transportation (e.g. car, bus, bike, etc.) and their location in 1-minute steps over all 24 hours of one sample day.

As the scientific discourse about bicycle traffic in Japan is scarce, we hope to be able to contribute by this study and provide valuable insights into this important mode of transportation.

Unfortunately the AAG allow only one paper presentation per person, so I will not be able to speak about my main research project… I also didn’t go forward in organizing a session for the conference as I did in 2013, but I’m very proud to have been assigned to the “Symposium on Synergistic Advances of CyberGIS and Geography” under the session topic “CyberGIS for Taming Big Data”. This symposium is organized by some very well-known and influential scholars in the fields of geography, GIS, and spatial data analysis: Luc Anselin, Budhendra Bhaduri, Chen-Chieh Feng, Jianya Gong, Diansheng Guo, Michael Goodchild, Krzysztof Janowicz, Mei-Po Kwan, Wenwen Li, Timothy Nyerges, Ed Parsons, Sergio Rey, Douglas Richardson, Anand Padmanabhan, Eric Shook, Alexandre Sorokine, Ming-Hsiang (Ming) Tsou, E. Lynn Usery, Shaowen Wang, Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, David White, Dawn Wright, Huayi Wu, and Chaowei Yang. Needless to say that I’m thrilled about this and can’t wait to go! As far as I can see there is no detailed schedule available online, yet, but I will amend this post with time and place information. Here are the preliminary conference program and the details for “my” session:

2620 Symposium on Synergistic Advances of CyberGIS and Geography: CyberGIS for Taming Big Data
Wednesday, 4/9/2014, from 4:40 PM – 6:20 PM in Room 20, TCC, First Floor

Sponsorship(s):
Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group
Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group
Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group

Organizer(s):
Shaowen Wang – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
E. Lynn Usery – U.S. Geological Survey

Chair(s):
Michael Finn – United States Geological Survey

4:40 PM
*E. Lynn Usery – U.S. Geological Survey
Research for the Three-Dimensional Elevation Program

5:00 PM
*Han Qin – George Mason University
Matt Rice – George Mason University
Kevin M. Curtin – George Mason University
Fabiana Paez – George Mason University
Crowdsourcing to support navigation for the disabled interactive on the George Mason University Fairfax campus

5:20 PM
*Yizhao Gao – UIUC
Shaowen Wang – UIUC
Anand Padmanabhan – UIUC
Spatiotemporal Event Detection using Massive Social Media Data

5:40 PM
*Konstantin Greger – University of Tsukuba
Yuji Murayama – University of Tsukuba
Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Bicycle Commuting Behavior in the Greater Tokyo Area Using a Micro-Scale Persontrip Database

I’m looking forward not only to talk about our research project, but also to hear many interesting talks by colleagues, and also to meet old friends as well as making many new. So if you haven’t booked your conference ticket yet, now is the time to register!

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