Over the past year, I have been collaborating with the Graham Sustainability Institute’s Water Center on qualitative research focused on improving the quality and relevance of analysis conducted as part of their project “Watershed Assessment of Detroit River Nutrient Loads to Lake Erie.” This project seeks to better understand the causes of harmful algal blooms in […]
New Article: ‘User acceptance of location-tracking technologies in health research: Implications for study design and data quality’
In the past several years I have been a participant in an exciting project to apply big data methods to the problem of neighborhood-scale health disparaties. In March, one of the methodological papers arising from this project was published, focused on our experiments using GPS devices to track the location of study participants. Here is […]
New Chapter: ‘Urban Informatics: Defining an emerging field’
Earlier this year I published a chapter in the new book, Big Data for Regional Science, titled “Urban Informatics: Defining an emerging field.” A limited preview is available on Google Books here.
New Paper: ‘An Evaluation Framework for the Use of Scenarios in Urban Planning’
Although I have been interested in scenario planning methodologies for several years, to date I have not published much scholarly work on the topic. As my first foray into the field, I recently completed a working paper for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on how scenario planning should be evaluated. Here’s the abstract: Professionals […]
New Article: GIS in Urban and Regional Planning
The Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIS&T) Body of Knowledge has quickly become an essential reference for the GIS field. Compiled by the University Consortium of GIS, the academic GIS network, the original GIS&T Body of Knowledge was published as a book in 2006, and featured high-quality, peer-reviewed chapters on a wide range of GIS […]
New Article: ‘Lessons for developing a planning support system infrastructure: The case of Southern California’s Scenario Planning Model”
How can a region create a shared technical infrastructure for planning? In order to find out, together with a student research assistant Cassie Hackel, I conducted an exploratory study of an effort to build such a system in Southern California. Here is the abstract of the paper which resulted from our research project: Although planning […]
New Book Chapter: ‘Crowdsourcing street beauty: Visual preference surveys in the big data era’
I contributed a chapter to the newly-released book, Big Data for Regional Science (eds. Laurie A. Schintler, Zhenhua Chen), on new methods for conducting urban visual preferences research. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: Aesthetic preferences for landscapes have been studied by researchers in many fields, given the importance of the issue to human well-being, […]