Minutes UCIME Group Meeting: February 17, 2000

 

*** Important Dates and Announcements:

1. Next UCIME Team Meeting will be the Thursday March 9th 8:30 in Keith's office. This is to organize the stakeholders meetings of the following week.

2. Stakeholders meetings at UCSB (Jeannette coordinating with assistance from Tim): March 14-15 for the USGS team and March 16-17 for UCIME and Stein's group.

3. April UCIME Team Meeting will be on Thursday April 20 at 8:30.

 

A. GIS and Environmental Modeling Conference in Banff, 9/2-8/00:

· In the Geoscience area, there is going to be a one day workshop on "Landuse Modeling" and a half day workshop on "The Theory of Integrated Modeling".

· Be sure to review the conference web page at: http://www.colorado.edu/Research/cires/banff/

 

B. Update Reports from each team member:

1. Keith: He reviewed the results of the UCGIS (University Consortium for Geographic Information Science) winter meeting held on February 7-8, 2000, in Washington, D.C. There was a congressional briefing of the importance of GI Science and education. The Gigalopolis project was presented and well received. There were not that many high level politicians in attendance but the word got out regarding our efforts.

2. Jeannette: Remade various graphics of the Growth Model for a presentation at the Western Mapping Conference in Menlo Park, USGS (date??). She will also be using this information when she will be assisting in the instruction of a GIS class at San Jose State is the spring. She has been running test cycles on the Urban Growth Model. Tommy Cathy from North Carolina has finished Version 3.0 of the model and it has been delivered to Keith. It comes as a tar file with one directory, containing all the necessary files.

3. Noah: Has been working on his thesis presentation that he gave to the Park people two weeks ago. The presentation went well and his results well received. He also has been working on his "Expert Opinion with GIS" talks for Baniff. He sent in two abstracts for the conference on the subject matter. He also has been working with Max Morrits (Cal Poly) and Jeannette on 1) the Forest Fire Database from 1910 to the present and 2) an Ignition Point coverage with attributes. The resolution is 0.1 miles, not great but a start. Thirdly, he has been working with Jeannette on forecasting with the model, starting in 1929 for areas with urban burns. They are looking at ways to tie into the existing parcel maps and insurance maps (Sandborn Maps). Finally, he is looking at the metrix for urban growth areas over time, related with road densities and using Jeannette's national data set. Noah has been in touch with Stein R. and is hoping to go to Los Alamos for an extended visit. Congradulations once again on the new additions to the family.

4. Xiaohang: She is continuing to review papers and develop research topic ideas. She is coordinating with Helen to solidify a dissertation topic in the area of how decision making influences the criteria of the map in a multi-criteria decision making frame work. She has been working on the concept of a Shadow Map of uncertainty to do error analysis, a representation of the degree of confidence in the material presented in the map. Keith recommended various references as he is working in this area with the NIMA project. In conjunction with her topic search, she is working on a bibliography of time analysis, continuous and discrete, which will be important for animations.

5. Helen: She is on the Riviera Home Owners Association. They are concerned with hazard of forest fires and they have just begun to work with Rick Church to model the situation. She is working on the IME part while Keith is focusing on the UC part of UCIME. She spoke briefly about her research, which is looking at the integration of the Application, Theory and Methodology of the model that coalesces to form the Implementation. Applications would include purpose, how are the users, which models should be integrated, identifying policy variables, user motivation, etc. Methodologies would include many properties yet to be defined, modeling languages and components to be combined to maximize the model utility. Theory: look at urban related changes, literature review, interactive entities, what are the concepts behind the model and what is its taxonomy (the interaction between models). Keith recommended contacting Drew Jones as he has worked on a local model with policy variables and the coupling of models.

6. Tim: He has been working on the Gantt Chart and studying C Programming. The chart should be done next week and he will bring a copy around to everyone. Plus, he will be meeting with Jeannette on Tuesday to go over the organization of the two Stakeholders meetings for next month. He is hoping that after those meetings he will have a clear direction in which to focus his research efforts.

 

C. Stakeholders Meetings:

1. Urban Dynamics (USGS/UCSB): (March 14-15) This is the workshop for the USGS folks who have been working on the model (7 or so people), but we are all invited to participate as background people. Dave Hester will be coordinating the meeting. They will be using a "Straw Man Agenda" for the meeting. We look forward to learning about this approach.

2. Urban Change Integrated Modeling (UCIME-UCSB/USGS/LANL): (March 16-17) The agenda for this meeting will be set next week. Keith will be the meeting coordinator. All of us will have to give a short description of what we have been doing, similar to the update reports given during our monthly meetings. These will need to be supported by graphics and be no longer than 15 minutes per person. Topics for the agenda will be: update reports from all of us, the plan for the third year, contents of the next proposal, plans for the summer research season, a review of the publication list and the workshops for Banff Conference (Theory and Landuse Modeling). William Acevedo (NASA Ames) and George Xian (USGS) will be in attendance.

 

Quote of the Meeting: "A map is a set of errors that have been agreed upon."