Through an interdisciplinary team of geographic information scientists and computer scientists, this project provides the next generation of scalable and high performance spatial analytical techniques. The main project goal is bridging two worlds: the spatial data management and geospatial analysis libraries that perform complex statistical analysis on geospatial datasets. This requires addressing the existing challenges that have hindered intensive utilization of geospatial data from different sources for more extensive analysis. To achieve this, the project will innovate new computational algorithms and combine them with scalable spatial and spatio-temporal data management techniques for regionalization, polygon-based queries, spatial-aware clustering, computational inference, and more.

This work is based on a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) to articulate K-12 and college pathways that will expand opportunities for all students to develop geo-computational thinking skills. This pilot RPP is composed of geographers, computer science educators, and geospatial technology specialists experienced in serving underrepresented minority students and communities. This exploratory research is to inform educational standards and tested approaches to help institutions understand the capacity they need to modernize geography education. The efforts is being extended to other scientific curriculum, such as biology and chemistry.

This project innovates scalable techniques and systems for Microblogs data, e.g., tweets, online reviews on TripAdvisor, Yelp, or Amazon, user comments on news websites, or social media micro-posts like comments, check-ins and interactions. We produced system prototypes, Kite and Taghreed.The ultimate goal of these systems is to serve as a scalable backend that facilitate building applications on top of Microblogs data hiding all the data management details from the developers, just like database systems work as backend for relational data applications. Taghreed is already powering a startup company serving social media analysis services for Middle Eastern customers, initially incubated by Wadi Makkah innovation incubator.