M. E. Hodgson, L. Li, and F. Hardisty
Some geographic data of interest to researchers and practitioners are not available as they are categorized as either classified or sensitive. These data may be the locations of critical resources (e.g. air monitors), health data (e.g. individuals with a disease), or disaster data (e.g. location of deaths). The goal of researchers and practitioners is to exploit these data for understanding their patterns to improve preparedness and response. The requirements for the primary data collectors include the protection of the privacy of individuals and safeguarding the locations of critical resources. A fundamental “masking” approach for hiding the location of point features is to randomly perturb the original location. Large perturbations hide the original location (and thus, protect privacy and security), yet remove spatial patterns relevant to research. This project evaluates a common geographic “masking” approach using an empirical assessment to address the question of what is the minimum perturbation amount that also provides an acceptable masking.
F. Hardisty
Geographic collaboration is a technology that has great value for coordinating spatially distributed research (such as START). A number of different technical approaches are available for collaborative visualization methods. This project provides a comparative assessment of these approaches to mediating conflicts between participants who are collaborating at the same time but in different locations.
D. Guo and K. Liao
The research underway views both individual-based daily activities and influenza spread as spatial interaction problems, where locations interact with each other via the visitors that they share or the virus that is transmitted from one place to another. The goal of the research is to: (1) develop a general visual analytic approach to synthesize very large interaction data sets and visually present patterns; and (2) develop a specific pandemic analysis and decision-support system that can be used to evaluate various response/containment strategies and support decision making in emergency situations.
Susan L. Cutter and Elizabeth Dunn
Since modern international terrorism began in July of 1968 with the hijacking of an El Al flight by three terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, print media have been seemingly inconsistent with the use of the term “terrorist” as well as the emphasis of the perpetrator of the event’s ethnicity and religion. This project systematically analyzes the content of print media’s coverage of specific terrorist events to answer the following questions: (1) Does the US’s media coverage of specific terrorist events vary depending on the group/person responsible (i.e. religion or ethnicity) and (2) How does the media coverage of events relate to the distribution of terrorist incidents as represented in the Global Terrorism Database? A multi-method analytical approach using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods will be used to address the research questions. The print media to be examined include: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.