Geo-Social Complexity

In the past, we have written about how the information and communication technologies could expand human dynamics from a pure physical space to a relational and cyber context. One finding we have noticed is the inseparable nature of human dynamics in the physical-digital "phygital" context.  In a recent publication, with Lucie Laurian ,  Andrew Crooks  and Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah , we explored how online interactions can foster voluntary mutual assistance during the Buffalo blizzard—and how these digital connections can translate into greater resilience in the physical world. The key findings include: 🔗 Brokers & weak ties : Online platforms created networks of weak ties that connected otherwise disconnected communities, expanding the flow of information and resources. 🤝 Online mutual assistance : Through social media conversations, people requested and offered practical, informational, and emotional support—including assistance that proved critical during the...

While previous studies are primarily based on the US, a recently published article shifts focus to Ghana in Africa. We ( Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah , Thomas Yeboah , Kahad Adamu , Enoch Yeleliere , Thomas Padi Appai, Kwaku O. Twum and myself) examined Ghana’s decentralized irrigation reform and their impacts on water users’ capacities to self-govern and cooperate in managing their irrigation systems. The study area is the Kpong Irrigation Scheme (KIS) that started operation in 1998, irrigating about 2125 hectares of paddy rice farms and 1140 hectares of banana farms.  We used both primary and secondary data including content analysis of key documents, stakeholder interviews, and surveys of farmers to explore the institutional designs informing the governance of KIS. The KIS case suggests an improvement in authority and responsibility principles in the institutional design of Ghana’s decentralized irrigation reforms. It also indicates that, on paper (rules-in-form), the decentrali...

The geo-simulation research domains including agent-based modeling requires high-quality synthetic population dataset that can capture individuals' demographic characteristics, spatial distribution and social connections.  In this paper published in Nature - Scientific Data ,  ( Na (Richard) Jiang , Boyu Wang ,  Andrew Crooks , and myself, we introduced a Python-based workflow that uses US Census 2020 dataset to generate  large-scale geographically explicit synthetic population for America’s 50 states and Washington  D.C. . The generated synthetic population is at individual level and their aggregated demographic attributes including age, gender distributions can match the US Census Data at the census tract level. In addition to demographic attributes such as age, gender, household and urban/rural status , our synthetic population data is also  geographically explicit by assigning home locations to individuals using road networks as a proxy. We also i...

 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’...