Research Interests:

My areas of research interest are geographic information systems (GIS), geographic knowledge discovery, and geo-visualization. These three components of my research are closely related and can be integrated within the context of environmental modeling.

Specifically, geographic information systems enable the collection, geo-coding, storage, preprocessing, and static display of environmental data and the construction of spatial databases. Geographic knowledge discovery is the extraction of spatial relations or patterns not explicitly stored in spatial databases. This is achieved through intelligent data mining algorithms. Applied to environmental data, these algorithms can be used to extraction relationships between variables in the environmental system and make predictions on certain variables given others measured. Geo-visualization involves the use of visual representations to make spatial contexts and problems visible, often with an interactive and animated visualization environment. It has been realized as an effective tool to explore geographic data and communicate geographic information to private or public audiences. In this means, it plays important roles in both geographic knowledge discovery and presenting the patterns or relationships extracted through geographic knowledge discovery.

Current Research:

My research examines geographic knowledge discovery (or spatial data mining) for environmental modeling. Specifically, my past and current research addresses the issue in the following aspects: 1) examining geographic knowledge discovery and classification from the perspective of human cognition, 2) developing schemes for organizing knowledge used in categorizing and mapping spatial entities with indeterminate boundaries, such as natural resource classes, wildlife habitats, natural hazards, among others, 3) integrating geo-visualiztion with geographic knowledge discovery for extracting spatio-temporal patterns, 4) investigating data mining algorithms for extracting such knowledge from spatial databases, and 5) applying the algorithms in modeling environmental variables such as air pollution.

Future Research:

My future research efforts will follow several directions:

1) Spatial data mining. I will continue my research efforts in spatial data mining and geographic knowledge discovery. I will expand my research to multi-scale data mining, data mining of long term climate data for extreme weather event patterns, spatio-temporal data mining for modeling contagious disease transmission and wildlife migration patterns.

2) Visualization. I will continue my research in this area and explore effective visualization methods for spatio-temporal modeling or urban air quality.

3) Environmental modeling. I will expand my research applications in soil mapping to other areas.

4) GIS applications in the Humanities. GIS methods can be used to analyze social problems such as urban segregation, criminal justice, etc.

| Home | About Me | Teaching | C.V. | Contact |