Paul Longley, University College London

 GIScience (GISc) and the 'new' urban geography 

In this opening lecture I will attempt to focus upon the 'geographic' element of the GISc acronym by examining some ways in which current interdisciplinary research applications are developing and adapting to computer intensive processing across the Web ('GeoWeb2.0'). Some of these changes relate to enduring themes within the disciplines of urban geography, economics, sociology, public health, and linguistics, while others owe more to generic developments such as Wikification, virtual Earth mashups, peer-to-peer computing and volunteered geographic information. The gallery of applications does not lead to any obvious prescriptions for the 'ownership' of the nascent discipline of GIScience, but it does confirm the continuing vitality of a fast developing area of activity, as well as some of the speed bumps to applied scientific problem solving.

Jeannette Wing, Carnegie Mellon and National Science Foundation

Computational Thinking

Abstract: My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world.  To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analystical ability.  Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science.  Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer.  It requires thinking at multiple levels of abstraction.  In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science.

Chris Johnson, University of Utah

Visual Computing

Abstract: Computers are now extensively used throughout science, engineering, and medicine.  Advances in computational geometric modeling, imaging, and simulation allow researchers to build and test models of increasingly complex phenomena and thus to generate unprecedented amounts of data.  These advances have created the need to make corresponding progress in our ability to understand large amounts of data and information arising from multiple sources.  In fact, to effectively understand and make use of the vast amounts of information being produced is one of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st Century.

Visual computing, which relies on and takes advantage of, the interplay among techniques of visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, and imaging and vision, is fundamental to understanding models of complex phenomena, which are often multi-disciplinary in nature.  In this talk, I will first provide several examples of ongoing visual computing research at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute as applied to problems in computational science, engineering, and medicine, then discuss future research opportunities and challenges.

Vincent Tao, Microsoft

Where is the ‘Where’

Driven by some fascinating innovations in on-line services, we are experiencing fundamental changes in ways we think, communicate, live and do business. Among many drivers that made a profound impact to the emergence of the Web as a computing and social platform, geospatial technology is probably the least expected. From on-line mapping to virtual worlds, from location based services to location commerce (L-commerce), from local search to local targeted advertising, location became indispensable part of the Web evolution.
Although there is a significant increase in the awareness of the location technology by the consumers and enterprises, the market penetration and the business integration of the location technology remains many challenges. This presentation will address the evolution of location technology, from where 1.0 to where 2.0. The speaker will present his insights about how we understand the merits of location, ie, ‘where’, and how ‘where’ is impacting our lives and business.  Finally, recent innovations at Microsoft Virtual Earth will be demonstrated.

John Polak, Imperial College London

Mobile Environmental Sensor Systems Across a Grid Environment 

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work has begun to exploit the capability of a variety of person-based, vehicle-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect real time data on key aspects of driver behaviour, vehicle characteristics and traffic conditions, emissions, ambient pollutant concentration and human exposure. The variety and pervasiveness of the sensor inputs available will increase significantly in the future as a result both of the increasingly widespread penetration of existing technologies (e.g., GPS based vehicle tracking, CANbus interfaces to on-board engine management system data) within the vehicle stock and the introduction of new sensor technologies (such as nanotechnology based micro sensors) offering lower cost, size and power consumption. A particularly exciting direction for future development is the use of vehicles and people as platforms for outward facing environmental sensor systems, enabling them to operate as mobile environmental probes, providing radically improved capability for the detection and monitoring of environmental pollutants and hazardous materials. However, these developments present new and formidable research challenges arising from the need to transmit, integrate, model and interpret vast quantities of highly diverse spatially and temporally varying sensor data.  

This presentation provides an overview of the MESSAGE (Mobile Environmenatal Sensor Systems Across a Grid Environment) project, which aims to address these challenges by means of a novel combination and extension of state-of-the-art e-Science, sensor and positioning technologies, and modelling (data fusion, traffic, transport, emissions, dispersion) techniques. By so doing, the MESSAGE project aims to develop the capability to measure, model and predict a wide range of environmental pollutants and hazards (both transport related and otherwise) using a grid of pervasive roadside and vehicle/person-mounted sensors. This work will be at the leading edge of e- Science, stretching the capabilities of the grid in a number of important respects. It also offers the prospect of facilitating a step change in the capability of underlying measurement and modelling capabilities in transport and environmental science. The project brings together leading research groups and individuals from the domains of e-Science, transport studies, air quality modelling, sensor technologies, positioning and communications systems together with a wide range of industrial collaborators and end users.  

The presentation will outline the background and motivation for the MESSSAGE project, discuss some of the key technical and practical challenges and describe current plans for deployment in London.

Mike Goodchild, David Mark, Rob Raskin, Dan Sui, Vincent Tao, Dawn Wright and Chaowei Yang

Digital Earth Panel