Spatial Data Mining, Analysis, and Visualization

Description

As modern technologies gradually come to permeate our lives, our use of them becomes second nature as the ``real’’ world naturally extends to include the online on. Even though the cognitive load imposed upon us to interact with state of the art technologies decreases, the amount of information that is collected and processed in the background can only increase. Such records provide a unique view of how we interact with these systems and, through them, how we interact with each other. In this tutorial we introduce the students to tools and techniques designed to harness this wealth of data with a special emphasis on datasets that reflect human behavior, interactions and collaborations. In particular, we will cover online social networks like Twitter and Foursquare, collaboration platforms such as Wikipedia and Github and, finally, how to scrape and extract information from generic webpages.

The massification of smartphone devices with Internet and GPS capabilities has once again opened the floodgates of innovation. As a result, most of the datasets we consider are enriched with detailed location information either in the form of precise GPS coordinates or as free text. In the second part of this tutorial we will introduce the participants to geolocation and spatial analysis and visualization techniques with practical examples and case studies using the data collected. To finalize, a full pipeline from data collection to result visualization will be described in detail.

Venue

All lectures will take place in “Sala Riunioni” of the “Dipartimento de Informatica” of the “Università degli Studi di Torino” in Turin, Italy.

Schedule