24th May
Applications open for EPSRC funded students
SS-ASM19
21-23 Aug. 2019 — London, UCL
Doctoral Summer School for Advanced Spatial Modelling:
Skills Workshop and Hackathon
Get good people together, treat them well and good projects will come.
The purpose of this workshop is threefold: firstly, to warm participants up to key quantitative methods and introduce them to core spatial modelling methods; secondly, apply these methods in the context of National Industrial Strategy - and in doing so, think about new governmental geography products and what future cities could look like; finally, foster collaborations opportunities between PhD students from different institutions through the hackathon and subsequent conference attendance award.
The techniques covered in this summer school come from geographical analysis and the hackathon on urban and infrastructure problems will be an opportunity to apply these.
Application timeline | Who are we looking for? | Syllabus and Tutors | Timetable
Why should I apply?
Successful applicants will receive…
- Travel and accommodation to London
- Lunch, dinner and social events
- Tutorials on new skills and refreshers on old ones
- Opportunities to meet excellent new people
- Support publishing hackathon outputs
Hackathon winners will receive…
- First Prize : Tickets to GISRUK 2020
- Second Prize : Signed copies of Inventing Future Cities
So have a look at the Who are we looking for? section and complete this brief application form by the 19th of July 2019.
Application timeline
31st May
Applications open for all students
19th July
Application deadline
26th July
Successful participants invited to attend the summer school
2nd August
Deadline for accepting invitations
6th August
Accommodation and travel booked
21st August
Summer school begins!
Who are we looking for?
We are looking for up to 20 enthusiastic PhD students who would like to learn the basics of spatial data analysis, share their own methods, and work collaboratively to apply these techniques to interesting datasets.
We also want to bring together teams of up to 5 working from a diverse range of research domains. Ideally we want candidates who come might benefit from exposure to quantitative spatial analysis. We will be covering many topics in a short amount of time and some experience using tools such as Python, R and QGIS for geography analysis will be beneficial but not necessary.
Here are some bullet points listing some of the qualities we are looking for:
Essential
- Willing and able to attend the full three days
- Play nice and be a good teammate
- Some experience in data analysis and a desire to learn more quickly
- Interest in using data analysis to address the Grand Challenges set out in the governments’ Industrial Strategy
Nice to have
- Experience with Python/Jupyter Notebook or R/RStudio
- Have the summer school link to your current research project
- Familiarity with geographic data and computational methods for working with such data
Still have question? Get in touch!
Syllabus and Tutors
The objective of the syllabus is to warm participants up to key quantitative methods and then introduce them to core spatial modelling methods. There will be a strong focus on demonstrating these methods with code snippets. Participants will see live coding examples they can experiment with and build upon for the hackathon. Over half the lesson time on the first two days is assigned to hands on coding and teamwork with the support of the course tutors.
Day 1
Room B09, 1-19 Torrington Place
London, W1CE 7HB
Day 1 will start by introducing important statistical measures, modelling techniques and cluster analysis. The second part of the day will cover working with vector spatial data and key spatial statistics.
Statistics 1: Zara Shabrina
Summarise and compare data visually
Simple linear regression
Statistics 2: Dr Georg Hanh
More regression models:
ANOVA, Logistic and Multiple Linear
Cluster analysis: Dr Thomas Oléron Evans
Similarity metrics
K-means, median and modes
Measures of quality
Spatial data and statistics 1: Bonnie Buyuklieva
UK administrative geographies
Spatial autocorrelation and interaction
Spatial data and statistics 2: Dr Robin Lovelace
Spatial data formats
Coordinate Reference Systems and Re-Projections
Spatial data and statistics 3: Dr David Murrell
Point Pattern Analysis
Spatial hypothesis testing
Day 2
Day 2 will start by covering the skills required to perform network analysis on geographic data. The second part of the day will cover working with raster data and satellite imagery.
Networks 1: Obi Sargoni
Directed vs undirected graphs
Adjacency matrices, node degree
Degree distribution
Connectivity
Networks 2: Dr Elsa Arcaute
Centrality and betweenness
Networks 3: Dr Neave O'Clery
Economic networks
Classifying satellite imagery 1: Matt Ng
Intro to satellite data
Stack, mosaic and clip raster data
Classifying satellite imagery 2: Dr Maxim Chernetskiy
Raster data classification
Classifying satellite imagery 3: Dr Andy MacLachlan
Working with Earth observation data
Applied Urban Heat Island analysis
Day 3
Hackathon!!!
The last day is dedicated to working collaboratively to explore a research question by applying the methods covered in the summer school to spatial datasets. This will give participants the opportunity to practice the skills they have learnt with the support of their peers and summer school tutors.
Time has been set aside on the first two days of the summer school for exploring the datasets and formulating a research question. Road network data, satellite imagery data and point locations data will be provided for teams to work with but teams are also welcome to work with other spatial datasets.
Prizes for winning hackathon teams are:
- First Prize : Tickets to GISRUK 2020
- Second Prize : Signed copies of Inventing Future Cities
Hackathon teams will be judged on the following criteria:
Application of spatial modelling techniques
Did the team apply apply a variety of methods suitably, going beyond the examples presented by tutors?
Addressing a research question
How well did the team address their research question?
Presentation
Did the team produce high quality figures?
Collaboration
Did the team work well together, allowing all team members to contribute to the work?
Timetable
| Time | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Statistics 1 | Networks 1 | Hackathon |
| 10:30 | Statistics 2 | Networks 2 | |
| 11:00 | Cluster analysis | Networks 3 | |
| 11:30 | Try methods | Try methods | |
| 12:00 | |||
| 12:30 | |||
| 13:00 | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch |
| 13:30 | |||
| 14:00 | Spatial data and statistics 1 | Classifying satellite imagery 1 | Hackathon |
| 14:30 | Spatial data and statistics 2 | Classifying satellite imagery 2 | |
| 15:00 | Spatial data and statistics 3 | Classifying satellite imagery 3 | |
| 15:30 | Break | Break | Break |
| 16:00 | Hackathon: Getting the data & brainstorming | Hackathon: Data exploration & project plan | Hackathon |
| 16:30 | |||
| 17:00 | Presentations and Prizes | ||
| 17:30 | |||
| 18:00 | Data Science and Industrial Strategy with CASA and the ONS Data Science Campus | Evening events, dinner, drinks, etc | |
| 18:30 | |||
| 19:00 | |||
| 19:30 | |||