AGILE PhD School 2024

7th Edition: GeoAI for the Social Good

November 27th to 29th 2024, at the Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana (Spain)

The AGILE PhD school is designed to connect PhD students from various countries. Its goal is to provide a forum for PhD students to showcase their research progress, exchange ideas, engage in discussions on geospatial methods, and enhance their geoinformatics-related skills.

Participation in the school will enable attendees to:

Slides and Shared Material

Pictures

Why to participate?

Attending the AGILE PhD School offers a great opportunity for PhD students within the European GIScience community. Ideally for PhD students in their second year or nearing their dissertation. The school aims to foster strong community academic connections, where participants will benefit from valuable insights shared by former AGILE PhD School alumni.

We have prepared an agenda to not only enhance students’ scientific writing skills but also deepen their understanding of GeoAI research. The AGILE PhD school provides a platform for the students to amplify the impact of their ongoing research through direct engagement with the AGILE community, get new ideas, and seek feedback about current preliminary results and share experiences about the PhD journey.

Where will it take place?

For the second time, the AGILE PhD school will be held in Castellon, which is situated between the beautiful Mediterranean Sea and the stunning Sierra de Espadán mountains. The 7th Edition of the school will be hosted at the University Jaume I, with the support of the Geospatial Research Group— GeoTec. Castellon is conveniently located between Valencia and Barcelona.

Keynote Speakers

Anita Graser

Anita Graser

Is a spatial data scientist, open source GIS advocate, and author with a background in geographic information science. She is currently Senior Scientist at AIT - The Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna. She serves on the QGIS project steering committee and has published several books about QGIS. Furthermore, she develops tools, such as the popular MovingPandas. Her contributions include developing QGIS plugins, writing user-friendly tutorials, and authoring books such as "Learning QGIS" and "QGIS Map Design." Anita also runs a widely-followed blog, Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings, where she shares insights and tutorials on open-source GIS solutions.

Prof. João Porto de Albuquerque

Professor Porto de Albuquerque

Is Professor in Urban Analytics at Urban Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), where he leads the " Urban Sustainability and Participation" theme. Professor Porto de Albuquerque is a geographer and computer scientist with an interdisciplinary background who conducts research on geographic information and urban sustainability, focusing on addressing inequalities in data and society. His work cuts across the borders between social and computing sciences, as well as between the global South and the global North. His pioneering and award-winning approach to participatory urban analytics combines participatory methods (e.g., citizen science, participatory GIS, action research, participatory software design) and geo-computational data science.

Rafael Verduzco Torres

Rafael Torres

Rafael is a Lecturer in Urban Analytics at the Division of Urban Studies and Social Policy. His work centres on the examination and potential applications of emerging forms of data and innovative methodologies to address urban mobility and transport research questions. He is particularly interested in the interactions between spatial accessibility, the urban economy, and social equity. Rafael contributes to teaching in the Urban Analytics and Urban Transport programmes and is also a member of the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), where he often collaborates with the Data Service in the development and curation of various datasets.

Selected Candidates

Get to know the 2024 PhD candidates who have been selected, find out their background, which AGILE institutions they are currently affiliated with, and most importantly, their research topics.

Programme

Last Update: 25 Nov, 14:00 - Details in progress

Meeting room

The PhD school will take place at the University Jaume I, in the Building called: “Investigació II” –> Level 0 - NB0003CC meeting room. Open GIS App Link Use the map to locate where meeting room is located inside the hosted university.

Day 1: Arrival to the Venue

Tuesday, November 26th 2024

Arrival of participants. Accommodation: Doña Lola hotel

Day 2: Welcoming and Fundamental Academic Skills

Wednesday, November 27th 2024

Facilitators: Alina Ristea, Hoda Bakhshi, Diego Pajarito, Fernando Benitez-Paez

Meeting room: NB0003CC room, Edificio de Investigación II, NB, Universitat Jaume I

Morning session

Afternoon session

Day 3: GeoAI for the Social Good

Thursday, November 28th 2024

Facilitators: Alina Ristea, Hoda Bakhshi, Diego Pajarito, Fernando Benitez-Paez

Meeting room: NB0003CC room, Edificio de Investigación II, NB, Universitat Jaume I

Morning session

Mobility Data Science in the Age of AI

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." (IBM 1979)

The current AI hype, driven by generative AI and particularly large language models (LLMs), is creating excitement, fear, and inflated expectations. In this talk, I will argue that to transform this hype into sustainable and positive development, we need to find ways to empower people to take control of their own assistive AI technology. To achieve this, spatial data science in general, and mobility data science in particular, must up their game and embrace open-source development and collaboration.

Each group selects one research proposal/idea and outlines how to enhance it using the tools and methods discussed. Outcome required: Develop a preliminary outline or draft of a potential journal paper, highlighting the problem, Research Question, methodology, and expected outcomes.

Afternoon session

Participatory Urban Analytics for Inclusive Data Innovations and Artificial Intelligence: Enabling Transformative Public Policy

Data innovations and Artificial Intelligence have the potential to support cities in addressing the most pressing challenges posed by the current triple planetary emergency and its climate, ecology, and social inequality dimensions. However, solutions built upon biased or partial data will not address the required challenges, since they may systematically misrepresent the realities of the most vulnerable communities. To overcome this, the talk introduces an approach to participatory urban analytics which bridges citizen participation and data science to address inequalities in data and society. Results from this approach show significant social impacts in the context of resilience to flood and landslide disasters in Latin American disadvantaged communities (the Waterproofing Data and URBE Latam projects) and the improvement of access to urban infrastructure and services in informal settlements in Kenya and Nigeria (IDEAMAPS Data Ecosystem project).

Day 4: Final presentations and closing remarks

Friday, November 29th 2024

Facilitators: Alina Ristea, Hoda Bakhshi, Diego Pajarito, Fernando Benitez-Paez

Meeting room: NB0003CC room, Edificio de Investigación II, NB, Universitat Jaume I

Morning session

Open Science and Reproducibility

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of reliable research, allowing others to validate findings by following the same methods and data to achieve similar results. This talk will introduce the current landscape of open science and reproducibility within the field of GIScience. Specifically, it will guide doctoral students through the Agile Reproducibility Guidelines and essential resources to enhance the reproducibility of their own work. Additionally, it will introduce The Turing Way—a project, handbook, and community dedicated to reproducible, ethical, and collaborative data science.

Based on the previous brainstorming sessions, and the progress with the drafted ideas, groups should prepare a brief presentation (max 3 slide) of their enhanced research proposal or draft journal paper, emphasizing the use or integration of keynote speakers’ tools, methods or ideas.

How to apply

The call to submit abstract has finished and the candidates were already selected, please keep an eye on the next AGILE PhD School.

To join the AGILE PhD School 2024, participants are required to submit a 300 to 500-word abstract summarising their ongoing research. The abstract may include preliminary results and highlight the relevance of your work to the main topic of the AGILE PhD School: GeoAI for the Social Good.

Your submission will be evaluated based on the clarity of your research, the significance of your preliminary findings, and their potential impact on the field of GeoAI.

Formatting instructions

Abstracts must be prepared using either the Word Document template or the LaTeX Document template provided at https://www.agile-giscience-series.net/agile-giss-templates.html. Abstracts must be written in English according to the formatting guidelines. Note: Latex recommended editor: Overleaf.

Financial support

Financial assistance is available to the selected participants. While we wish we could cover all the related expenses, our budget is limited, and participants may be required to contribute. More details will be provided to the selected participants.

Organising Commitee

Sponsors

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/BEGIN-StAndrews/agilephdschool2024, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".