This specialist meeting (workshop) is co-funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) project award #1416509, IBSS: Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social Networks and award #1634641, IMEE: Integrated Stage-Based Evacuation with Social Perception Analysis and Dynamic Population Estimation .The goal of this workshop is to foster the multidisciplinary collaboration in related research disciplines, including geography, linguistics, computer science, political science, public health, civil engineering, and communication. The two-day workshop (August 15 and August 16, 2017), organized by the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) at San Diego State University, brought together over 30 specialists drawn from many disciplines. The workshop assessed the current state of the art technologies and tools for studying social media analytics and decision support systems, identify and prioritize a research agenda, and begin the development of a research community of collaborating scholars working on these Big Data, social media, and decision support systems (DSS) issues.
Over 30 specialists and scholars were invited by the NSF IBSS and IMEE project team, consisting of PI Ming-Hsiang Tsou (Geography) and Co-PIs Brian Spitzberg (Communication), Jean Mark Gawron (Linguistics), Heather Corliss (Public Health), Jay Lee (Geography, Kent State), Xinyue Ye (Geography, Kent State), Xuan Shi (Geosciences, U of Arkansas), Atsushi Nara (Geography, SDSU), Xianfeng Yang (Civil Engineering, SDSU), and Sahar Ghanipoor Machiani (Civil Engineering, SDSU). The meeting included plenary presentations by invited experts, lightning talks, and focus group discussions. This workshop generated a final report to be published on the IBSS and IMEE project website. This year, our research theme was “Social Media Analytics and Decision Support Systems: Applications to Public Health and Crisis Management”. The dynamic supply of big data from millions of social media messages, GPS tracks, medical records, wireless sensors, electronic health records, web pages, and cellular phones, becomes an important research domain. Big data provide untapped potentials for analyzing dynamic human problems and enabling intelligent decision support systems for business analytics, disease outbreaks, crisis management, traffic patterns, urban dynamics, bioinformatics, and environmental changes. Big data offer golden opportunities for scientists to develop new smart decision support systems, which require transdisciplinary collaboration and research methodologies to integrate multiple perspectives into collaborative research endeavors. This workshop will build a collaborative platform for scientists and researchers to work together. Specific research questions addressed in the workshop included:
1. What theoretical models can facilitate prediction of public health crisis information diffusion and response?2. What are some innovative ways that health behavior theories have been applied to understanding the influence of social media on human behavioral health and health outcomes? 3. What critical information are potentially obtainable through crowd sourcing during crisis management, and what is an efficient process to produce insight and use this information?4. How to effectively consider the uncertainty of evacuation demand and deal with the trade off between efficiency and robustness in the evacuation model?5. Regarding user interface design and functionalities on a web-GIS based decision support system for crisis management, what are key elements that can be beneficial to stakeholders?
PI, Co-PIs, and Senior Personnel:
Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou (PI, SDSU) bio
Dr. Brian Spitzberg (IBSS Co-PI, SDSU) bio slides
Dr. Mark Gawron (IBSS Co-PI, SDSU) bio
Dr. Heather Corliss (IBSS Co-PI, SDSU) bio slides
Dr. Michael Peddecord (IBSS SDSU Affiliated)
Dr. Atsushi Nara (IMEE Co-PI, SDSU) bio slides
Dr. Sahar Ghanipoor Machiani (IMEE Co-PI, SDSU) bio slides
Dr. Xianfeng Yang (IMEE Co-PI, SDSU) bio slides
Dr. Jay Lee (Co-PI, Kent State) bio
Dr. Xinyue Ye (Co-PI, Kent State) bio paper slides
Dr. Xuan Shi (Co-PI, University of Arkansas) bio paper slides
Participant List
IBSS Project National Visiting Committee Members:
Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd (Associate Professor, Director of the Social Media Lab, Ryerson University, Canada) bio paper slides
Dr. May Yuan (Ashbel Smith Professor, Geospatial Information Sciences, UT-Dallas) bio slides
IMEE National Visiting Committee Members:
Dr. Satish Ukkusuri (Professor, Civil Engineering, Purdue University) bio paper
Dr. Tom Cova (Professor, Geography, Director of Center for Natural & Technological Hazards, University of Utah) bio paper
Mr. Michael Robles (San Diego County OES staff).
Invited
Dr. Haizhong Wang, Oregon State, (Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering) bio paper
Dr. Annice Kim (Senior Social Scientist, RTI International) bio paper
Dr. Hilary McMillan (Associate Professor, Geography, SDSU).
Dr. Lourdes Martinez (Communications, SDSU) bio paper slides
Ms. Leslie Ray (Senior Epidemiologist, County of San Diego HHS)
Dr. Xiaobai Liu (Computer Science, SDSU)
Dr. Ilkay Altintas (UCSD and CalIT2) slides
Mr. Ray Chaney (211 San Diego)
Dr. Jesse Nodora (UCSD Moores Cancer Center)
Dr. Gabriel Doyle (SDSU Linguistics) bio
Dr. Su Han (HDMA Post Doc, SDSU) slides
HDMA Center Research Team
Alejandra Coronado (Geography, SDSU)
Hao Zhang (Geography, SDSU)
Rick Zhang (Geography, SDSU)
Eva Sanchez (Urban, SDSU)
Nick Mesler (Civil engineering, SDSU)
Alpita Masurkar (Computer Science, SDSU)
Chanwoo JIN (new Ph.D. student)
Jaehee Park (new Ph.D. student)
Chi-Feng (Jeff) Yen (new M.S. student)
Ashley Aure (Linguistics, SDSU)
Caitlin Cole (Public Health, SDSU)