Dr. Somayeh Dodge of UCSB

Abstract:

Intentional movement through space is one of the traits shared by humans and animals to perform activities. Movement of individuals is fundamental to the dynamics of ecosystems, cities and environments, and can be utilized as a key to understand and model environmental and behavioral variability in social and ecological systems. As a result of ubiquitous tracking and the increasing access to movement data in both trajectory and aggregate forms, a number of disciplines, from animal ecology to urban planning, from biology to geography and public health, share an interest in understanding movement and activity patterns of humans and animals in natural and built environments. While there is a shared interest in geography and ecology to understand and model movement behavior with respect to geographic space, there has been little cross-fertilization across these disciplines. From the lens of geographic information science, this presentation reviews recent advances in computational movement analytics, and argues for a convergent movement data science to study and map movement across the human and animal divide.

Biography:

Dr. Somayeh Dodge is an Assistant Professor of Spatial Data Science and leads the MOVE Research Lab in the Department of Geography at UCSB. She received her PhD degree in Geography with a specialization in Geographic Information Science (GIScience) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. She holds an MS degree in GIS Engineering and a BS degree in Geomatics Engineering from the KNT University of Technology, Iran. Dr. Dodge is a recipient of the prestigious CAREER award from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2021, and the 2022 Emerging Scholar Award from the Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Her NSF-supported research focuses on developing data-driven analytics, knowledge discovery and modeling approaches, and visualization techniques to study movement in human and ecological systems. Her work has appeared in a number of high-ranked journals including Methods in Ecology and Evolution, International Journal of Geographic Information Science (IJGIS), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Movement Ecology, Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS), and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS). Dr. Dodge currently serves on the Board of Directors of the University Consortium for Geographic Information (UCGIS), and as the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Spatial Information Science. Before joining UCSB in July 2019, Dr. Dodge served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2016-2019) and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (2013-2016). Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering at The Ohio State University.