1) Two new permanent lectureships with an emphasis on visualization and visual analytics are available in the Department of Computer Science at City University London.

Post 1: Visual and Analytic Computing [permanent, full time, deadline June 10, 2013]
Academic focus on Information Visualization, Visual Analytics or Information Retrieval: http://j.mp/city2013visualAnalyticComputing

Post 2: Applied Data Science [permanent, full time, deadline June 10, 2013]
Academic focus on Information Analytics, Information Visualization and business processes: http://j.mp/city2013appliedDataScience

Talk to Jo Wood or Jason Dykes about these.

2) Oxford Internet Institute: “Digital Inequality” -Researcher [full-time, 1-year first, possibly renewable, deadline June 13]
“Candidates should have a strong background in statistics and Stata plus the ability to use GIS tools to visualise results in both static and interactive formats.”

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/newpositions/#p33

Speak to Grant Blank and Mark Graham for this.

3) Geomatics Professor, Geospatial Information System (GIS) Université Laval, Québec“: [..] “the research activities of the incumbent will have to be oriented toward the development and application of spatial analysis methods (2D/3D) as well as database design methods” with an emphasis on user generated data & there’s teaching and admin as usual! [deadline June 26]

https://www.rh.ulaval.ca/cms/accueil/emplois/emplois_professeurs?offre=56799&lang=en

4) TU Berlin, Germany: Professor of “Methods of Geoinformation Science” – Deadline: tomorrow

http://www.fig.net/jobs/2013/TU_Berlin_W3_Prof_Geoinformation_Science.pdf

The new Samsung Galaxy S IV looks to be the first smart phone to be release which will  have in-built eye tracking. This will provide additional functionality to the user in being able to “Eye Scroll” as a form of navigation. However, it is also raising privacy concerns as reported by Future Tense.  With eye tracking becoming more main stream this could possibly open up new research opportunities in running eye tracking experiments and analysing Big Data.

The ISPRS Conference on “Serving Society with Geoinformatics” ISPRS2013-SSG (http://www.isprs2013-ssg.org/), jointly organized by ISPRS TC II, III, IV and VII, will take place in November 2013 in Antalya, Turkey.

It will be joined by two workshops:

• Object Extraction for 3D City Models, Road Databases and Traffic Monitoring
• Laser Scanning

Please circulate the link to anyone interested!

You surely have heard of “MOOCs” (short for Massive Open Online Course). There are hundreds of classes that one can participate online, by prominent professors from well-known universities. And hundreds, and sometimes hundreds-of-thousands people seem to do it (take these classes). This is an exciting development as it allows people to get a taste of something potentially very expensive*, and likely to be unreachable because of boundaries and other space/time constraints, even if you had the money. If you actually follow through the online courses, you get the whole deal; lecture (you can listen to whenever you want, have the teacher repeat something as many times as you want), the exercises, and classmates (over forums). It’s not the real thing where you have face-to-face interaction, but from certain aspects, it comes pretty close (you just need to have the self-discipline to follow the schedule through ).

All that said, this blog is mainly about a new MOOC on maps, by Anthony Robinson, a member of our working group; whom also was with us when we organized the ISPRS workshop last September. Anthony offers a 5-week course (6-9h/week workload) over at coursera, where you can:

“Learn how advances in geospatial technology and analytical methods have changed how we do everything, and discover how to make maps and analyze geographic patterns using the latest tools.”

Have a look! You may find some of it interesting and useful.
https://www.coursera.org/course/maps

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* When I say potentially expensive, I’m thinking of the tuition fees in the US universities. I know of the saying “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance” — but I believe that wasn’t meant for defending commercializing of the education. Many of the European countries still offer free higher education (costs of running a university then is mainly covered by the state, i.e. taxes). I had to urge to look and see what’s the global situation (access to education in relation to costs) but didn’t find a map based on a quick search. Do any of you know such a map/set of maps?

An exciting position for a software developer magician and UI guru with a spatial twist is available in the AURIN Project, run from the University of Melbourne.

If you are fluent in JavaScript, have a good understanding of cartography, data visualization, and need a challenge developing rich user interfaces on the Web, look no further!

More info here.

–Martin

Below are two TEDx talks by fellow geovisualization/GIScience folks with two different focuses we just had to share with you:

Here, Mark Graham (Uni Oxford) talks about “Internet and information geographies, and the overlaps between ICTs and economic development” with plenty of visuals (~22min): TEDxBradford – Mark Graham – Internet & Information Geographies

And here, Jo Wood (City Uni, London) talks about bikes! 16 million journeys by bike in London, with beautiful visualizations (~15 min): London Moves, visualising 16 million cycle journeys across the UK capital: Jo Wood at TEDxEastEnd

ps. I also gave a TEDx talk back a year ago or so here in Zurich on interdisciplinary science with a ‘geo’ spin, seems like TEDx communities like maps! Let us know if there are other TED or TEDx talks out there which may be relevant to geovisualization/GIScience/Virtual & Augmented Reality, we could make a ‘playlist’.

Some of our WG members are in the program committee for CUPUM2013, and we just received a reminder. I dutifully pass this on to our blog followers. Maybe of interest to some of you:

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This is a reminder to inform you about the approaching deadline for submission of Full Conference Papers for the CUPUM Conference (deadline February 15, 2013). Please also see: http://cupum2013.geo.uu.nl. We really hope this will provide you with sufficient opportunity to submit a conference paper in time.

Please redistribute this announcement to others who might be interested to participate too. On behalf of the organizing committee, we hope to meet you all in July 2-5, 2013 at the CUPUM Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Stan Geertman
Henk Ottens
John Stillwell
Fred Toppen

Themes

• Uncertainties in real world entities and ontology
• Spatial accuracy assessment
• Accuracy evaluation for DEM
• Temporal uncertainty in spatial data
• Incompleteness of spatial data
• Logical consistence in spatial database
• Semantic uncertainty in geographic data
• Uncertainty in remotely sensed image processing
• Uncertainty versus scales
• Quality assessment in spatial data generalization
• Spatial data models for uncertain objects in GIS
• Model validation with imperfect ground truth data
• Assessment of quality of crowdsourcing spatial data
• Uncertainty propagation in spatial analyses and operations
• Spatial querying and reasoning with uncertain data
• Uncertainty in geographical and environmental analysis
• Spatial data quality and decision making
• Spatial statistics
• Geostatistical methods for spatial data quality assessment
• Stochastic spatial simulation
• Spatial data quality and web- and mobile-based services
• Uncertainty in geovisual analytics
• Quality of spatial data visualization
• Meta-data and model for GIS data

Organizers

• International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) WG II/1, WG II/2, WG II/4, WG II/6, ICWG II/IV
• Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Faculty of Construction and Environment, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, LIESMARS, Wuhan University

Keynote Speakers

• Dr Paul Cheung           Director, Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,  United Nation
• Prof Mike Goodchild     Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• Prof Brian G Lees        Editor-in-Chief, IJGIS, School of Physical, Environmental & Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales: Canberra, Australia
• Prof Deren Li               State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, China
• Prof Alfred Stein          Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, The Netherlands

Important Dates

Deadline for Abstract Submission:                 31st January 2013
Notification of Acceptance:                           15th February 2013
Deadline for Full Paper Submission:              15th April 2013
Early Bird Registration:                                15th April 2013
Symposium Date:                                        30th May 2013 – 1st June 2013

Abstract Submission

The Organizing Committee invites abstract submission for consideration by the programme committee and inclusion in the Symposium programme. Abstracts should be 250 – 500 words in English and should reach the Symposium Secretariat (issdq2013.lsgi@polyu.edu.hk) before 31st January 2013. Online submission system will be opened soon.

Publications

A CD publication will be published and distributed during the Symposium. A book with selected papers from the Symposium will be published after the Symposium.

Website

Interested parties please visit http://www.lsgi.polyu.edu.hk/ISSDQ2013 for up-to-date information and registration.

Should you have any enquiries, please contact the Symposium Secretariat at issdq2013.lsgi@polyu.edu.hk or Miss Fiona Fong at +852 3400 3897 or Miss Violet Tsang at +852 2766 4350.

Organizing Committee, ISSDQ 2013

Hong Kong

This just in …

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The giCentre at City University London has research interests in information visualisation design, application and theory to support exploratory data analysis, visual analytics and the dissemination of information. We specialise in data and analyses that have geographical and temporal components.

City University London is offering studentships for 3-year full-time PhD candidates. Successful candidates will have tuition fees paid and a tax-free bursary that will cover living costs.

This university-wide scheme is very competitive, so we are looking for particularly able candidates with strong proposals for research. Contact us with your initial proposal by 15th February and we can provide feedback before the university submission deadline of 1st March. See http://gicentre.org/ for more details.

Prof Jo Wood
Prof Jason Dykes
Dr Aidan Slingsby

giCentre, School of Informatics,
City University London
http://gicentre.org/
gicentre@soi.city.ac.uk

Couple of folks at the urbanprototyping.org are running a data challenge which may be just right for this audience, take a look!

Below quote is from http://urbanprototyping.org/prototype/challenges/urban-data-challenge-zurich-sf-geneva/:

What’s the heartbeat of your city? Does data make your pulse race?

Example Project: Ville Vivante
“Buses, trams, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars zoom about modern cities like blood pulsing through the body. But with urban growth comes challenges—one of them is how to improve transportation. Luckily, advances in technology combined with active open data and open source movements mean the citizenry can increasingly become part of the solution. Unclog the arteries, stimulate circulation. The Urban Data Challenge seeks to harvest the innovative and creative power of communities around the world to explore urban data sets through visualization. Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities—San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich—and draw meaningful insights. Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app.”

February 6th: Launch events in San Francisco, California at swissnex→ and Geneva, Switzerland at the 2013 Lift Conference→
February 8th: Opendata.ch Hackathon, Lift Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Register→
February 23rd: International Open Data Day Hackathon, San Francisco, California at GAFFTA; Meet-up in Zurich, Switzerland
April 8th: Awards Ceremony, San Francisco, California and Zürich, Switzerland

[...]
[see more here]

ps. Happy 2013 to all of our blog followers!