Geo-Social Complexity

 In the past, we have built an agent-based model to simulate individuals' Covid-19 vaccines uptakes in a rural county - Chautauqua (New York) . Recently,  at the  7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024) ,  we ( Na (Richard) Jiang , Andrew Crooks , and Lucie Laurian ) have extended that model  to the entire New York State to explore the diffusion of Covid-19 opinions in a hybrid context (e.g., physical, relational and cyber spaces) and its impacts on people's attitudes which are reflected in their vaccination behaviors.  This project has significantly extended the previous work in a number  of ways.  First , we move the model from a single rural county to the  entire NYS that has 62 counties which differ substantially in socioeconomic status and move from a small population of 120,000 to  over 20 million agents . By doing so, it allows us to compare vaccination uptakes in different areas (e.g., ur...

In the past, we have wrote about using spatial statistics to detect clusters of housing abandonment and demolition in Buffalo, NY as a macro level for the entire city. Now, moving from the city to the household level, we ( Li Yin , Robert M. Silverman and myself) have developed an agent-based model to capture the emergence of housing abandonment patterns from bottom up.  Particularly, the model captures individual households' decision-making process with respect to housing abandonment by including factors such as the housing attributes (e.g., lot front size, building age, housing sale prices) and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., existence of abandonment properties in the neighborhood, adjacency to anchor institutions, and 311 reports). The beauty of agent-based model (of course, our model as well) lies in its ability to capture interactions between agents. Specifically, in our model, each household's decision-making on keeping their house or not can affect their neighbor...

In the previous study on Covid-19 vaccine debates , we have revealed the complex communication patterns in hybrid spaces. A following up question that intrigues us is when people are exposed to such complicated conversational context hybrid spaces, with contradictory opinions, how do they make decisions about Covid-19 vaccine uptake.  To answer these questions,  with Andrew Crooks , and Li Yin , we have published a new article  " How information propagation in hybrid spaces affects decision-making: using ABM to simulate Covid-19 vaccine uptake " in the  International Journal of Geographical Information Science .  This research is the first one that has combined the Space-place (Splatial) framework with the social influence network theory and applied to them model Covid-19 vaccine uptake at individual level.  Our model captures the temporal dynamics of vaccination progress with small errors (MAE = 2.45). Our results suggest that all hybrid spaces are indispe...

Working with different stakeholders and local communities in Buffalo, we ( Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah ,  Zachary Korosh ,  Samina Raja ,  Yeeli Mui ,  Martha Bohm ,  Allison DeHonney ,  Rebekah Williams ,  Carol Ramos-Gerena and myself) make visible the social network infrastructure of people sustaining the urban food system in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY. Abstract:  This article makes visible the social network infrastructure of people sustaining the urban food system in the  post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY. It does so by probing how networks are launched and sustained over time,  who is responsible for the networks, and to what end. The authors employ a survey to collect data on social  networks among actors within the city’s food system. The findings suggest that Buffalo’s urban food system is a  constellation of close-knit networks comprised primarily of local grassroots organizations having ‘small world’...

With Chihuangji (Herbert) Wang , Yixuan Zhao, and Li Yin , we have evaluated 78 Smart City proposals that have been submitted to U.S. Department of Transportation 2015 Smart City Challenge.  Abstract: Smart City (SC) strategies developed by local governments reflect how governments and planners envision SC and apply smart technologies, and what challenges they face and try to address. Little attention, however, has been given to investigating SC strategies or applications, especially in the U.S. context. Moreover, there is insufficient attention paid to whether SC strategies address social issues such as equity and public participatory opportunities. Based on the documentation from the U.S. Department of Transportation 2015 Smart City Challenge, we developed a framework to evaluate SC strategies on urban transportation systems using six standards: Safety, Mobility, Sustainability, Opportunity, Efficiency, and Equity. In addition, we synthesized the challenges U.S. smart cities enco...

During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown and social distancing policies have greatly limited human activities in the physical space, and people relied on social media to stay connected while being physically apart. With  Andrew Crooks and Li Yin , we studied how social media affects information propagation from physical to relational and cyber spaces.    Abstract: With the advent of social media, human dynamics studied in purely physical space have been extended to that of  a cyber and relational context. However, connections and interactions between these hybrid spaces have not  been sufficiently investigated. The “ space-place (Splatial) ” framework proposed in recent years allows capturing  human activities in the hybrid of spaces. This study applies the Splatial framework to examine the information  propagation between cyber, relational, and physical spaces through a case study of Covid-19 vaccine debates in  New York State (NYS). Whereby...

Li Yin , Robert M. Silverman and myself, we have published a article entitled "Spatial clustering of property abandonment in shrinking cities: a case study of targeted demolition in Buffalo, NY’s African American neighborhoods" in Urban Geography.  Abstract Many low-income and minority-concentrated neighborhoods have been struggling for decades with the acute problem of endemic abandonment in shrinking cities. Using high-resolution spatial– temporal data, this study attempts to extend our understanding of the influence of abandonment on future abandonment and the impact of interventions such as demolition by identifying spatial patterns of housing abandonment and demolition in Buffalo, New York when the city invested heavily in an aggressive 5-in-5 demolition plan targeting predominantly African American neighborhoods with high rates of abandonment. Our results confirmed that the clustering of abandoned properties has been consistently confined to the city’s majority African...