Geo-Social Lab is home to research projects aimed at analyzing and understanding massive and complex geo-social networks and geospatial processes that drive our economy, society, and the environment.
We develop innovative computational algorithms and geovisualization techniques to help address real-world problems in diverse areas such as human mobility and migration, demography, kinship networks, public health, hazards and social vulnerability, global trade and commodity flows, and public discourse and information diffusion.
Kelvin Liu and Kevin (Rongxuan) Zhu, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Kelvin's research poster!
Click for Kevin's research poster!
Hoeyun succesfully defended her Ph.D. on May 8, 2023, and is now a Ph.D! Congrats Dr. Kwon! Dr. Kwon will continue her journey as a postdoc in University of Colorado Boulder! Learn more about Hoeyun!
Caglar was elected as the Vice President of Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Read More
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the unequal impact of COVID-19 by analyzing the mobility behaviors of socially vulnerable populations at the AutoCarto 2022 conference held at Redlands, CA. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Maryam presented our research on mapping migration regions and their evolution from population-scale family trees at The 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities’22), November 1, 2022, Seattle, WA. Read the conference proceeding
Caglar presented FlowMapper at NACIS 2022 in Minneapolis. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Caglar participated on a panel about multigenerational households on ABC/Channel 9 on "Ethical Perspectives On the News" moderated by Leon Tabak. Watch the panel on YouTube!
Super excited to announce NSF funding ($477,734) of our project on population-scale kinship networks and migration! Public abstract
Welcome to Fall 2022 and our new Ph.D. Student, Maryam Torkashvand!
Adelina Chau and Jonathan Fan, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Adelina's research poster!
Click for Jonathan's research poster!
Very excited to collaborate with Jacob Oleson (Biostatistics) on National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded project ($1,188,804), "Development of Small Area Interactive Risk Maps for Cancer Control Efforts". Public abstract
Hoeyun Kwon won the prestigious Doctoral Scholarship Award of 2022 by the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Congrats Hoeyun!
Hoeyun Kwon won the second place in GIS Specialty Group Student Honors Paper Competition at AAG 2022! Congrats Hoeyun!
Our papers "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" and "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" have been published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science and Journal of Maps!
Congrats for Hoeyun Kwon for successfully defending her dissertation proposal and becoming a Ph.D. candidate!
Our paper "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" has been accepted for publication in Cartography and Geographic Information Science!Preprint available
Our paper "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Maps! Check Flowmapper! Check out the preprint!
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 prevalence at GIScience 2021 workshop on Advancing Movement Data Science (AMD’21). Click for Hoeyun's blog post!
Geng Tian updates us on how he is doing in China, working on a very cool project - unmanned vehicles delivering food! Click for Geng's blog post!
Kaitlyn Hom and Mark Rifkin, both senior high school students, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Kaitlyn's blog post!
Angelina Evans worked as an intern in the US Department of Energy's prestigious Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Click for Angelina's blog post!
Associate Professor
Geographical and Sustainability Sciences
University of Iowa
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
M.A. in Geography
B.S. in Geography / Minor in Computer Science & M.S. in Geoinformatics
B.S. in Geography, Geographic Information Science
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
M.A. in Geography / GIScience
B.S. in Geography / Geographic Information Science
B.S. in Informatics
2023 | Kelvin Liu,Rongxuan Zhu |
2022 | Adelina Chau,Jonathan Fan |
2021 | Kaitlyn Hom, Mark Rifkin |
Spatial interactions are the movements of tangible and intangible phenomena such as people, goods, vehicles and information between locations. Spatial interactions form location-to-location networks. Analysis of spatial interaction networks is critical for diverse domains such as migration, epidemics, health care, transportation, and economy. Flow maps are commonly used to visualize spatial interactions and facilitate the understanding of patterns of spatial flows and the corresponding spatial context.
Understand the spatial, temporal and relational (network) aspects of dynamic spatial-social networks. A dynamic geo-social network evolves (changes) over space and time as the actors of the network move (migrate), new actors are added or removed, and relationships between the actors develop and change over time.
Support a human-centered process for pattern searching and knowledge construction through geovisual analytics and usability evaluation.
Provide a data-driven understanding of the complex system of human society and the physical environment through the novel implementation and application of geospatial artificial intelligence.
Big data analytics for social media and networking applications, e.g., geospatial semantics, natural language processing, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, machine learning and deep learning methods.
We offer a diverse set of degrees and research experiences for graduate, undergraduate and high school students through the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences, and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program at Informatics (IGPI), and the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Graduate teaching and research fellowships, and assistantships are available for competitive students. Before applying, please contact Caglar Koyluwith your brief research interests and CV attached. Competitive students will be invited for a Skype interview. The interview starts with a 6 minute, 40 second, a Pecha Kucha style presentation. Your presentation should focus on your current work, future research goals and interests, and how those intersect with the Lab's research agenda.
In addition to the above research interests, students should have, or be interested in developing, ability in: