TITLE:

Albany, Baton Rouge, Santa Barbara: There Goes the Neighborhood – in N-Dimensional Space!

DATE:

Friday, November 30th, 2007

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Andre Skupin, Department of Geography, San Diego State University

ABSTRACT:

Could it be that, as we traverse certain parts of Baton Rouge, we are
somehow instantaneously transported to Santa Barbara, CA, or Albany, NY?
Or, in more general terms, as we move across geographic space, aren’t we
simultaneously traveling through a high-dimensional attribute space in
which the geographic entities are located that we encounter along the
way? Of course, such movements overlaid in N-dimensional space may be
difficult to see, especially when we are not familiar with all of the
involved places and when dealing with a very large number of dimensions.
In order to aid the human mind in understanding the paths taken during
this type of attribute space travel, it is here proposed to create
map-like visualizations of high-dimensional paths. A specific
methodology is presented for achieving this by integrating a form of
artificial neural networks known as Kohonen map or self-organizing map
(SOM) with space-time paths captured by GPS. Among the envisioned
applications are novel forms of surrogate or virtual travel and
comparative studies of people’s movement across separate geographic
territories. A number of case studies serve to illustrate the technique,
including a traversal of the Austrian capital, Vienna, and urban travel
in the U.S. combined with population attributes for all 200,000+ census
block groups.

HOST:

Rob Edwards

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