Faculty Pick 
Each newsletter a faculty member shares a relevant article, dashboard, visualization or video. This newsletter's faculty pick is Dr. Wende Mix, associate professor in the Geography and Planning department.
by Wende Mix
Think Tank: GeoAI Reveals a Glimpse of the Future
Why I chose this article and why should others read it?
ESRI, undoubtedly the largest global company for GIS, recently has promoted spatial analysis using AI and ML. For those of us who have been ‘doing’ GIS/spatial analysis for decades, many of the applications appear on the surface to be examples of the types of analysis that we have been doing all along. This perspective often is an issue for data science, in general.
The interviewer asks, specifically, why the examples being given are, in fact, different! In the videos associated with the interview, Wendy Keyes gives some very interesting and thought-provoking examples of how AI enhances basic spatial modeling approaches. Her argument includes the use of more and different data in an analysis and, an idea I found very interesting, changing the perspective of the analysis to the individual as opposed to the company. Human behavior is very complicated to model, so using AI, ML, or deep learning methods along with spatial analytics offers exciting possibilities.
Way back (when dinosaurs roamed the earth!) my dissertation was related to route choice modeling to predict driver’s destinations in the event of non-recurring incidents requiring detours. In short, dynamic route choice models. Forty years later, I can see the potential of GeoAI to better address this issue thus improving efficiency and sustainability of our transportation networks in major urban areas.
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