quasify

I was over Harvard way Friday for a georeferencing conference at the Center for Geographic Analysis. A number of people spoke on the creation & mapping of various spatial data across time and space within a range of disciplines. In interest of raising the level of intellectual discourse on this site, I’ll share with you some brief health research related highlights from those who didn’t induce early-onset narcolepsy. Jarvis Chen from HSPH gave an interesting (and surprisingly funny, given the topic) talk on geocoding of public health disparities (his group’s homepage is here). Specifically interesting was his take on ZIP codes vs census tracts (he’s in favor of avoiding the former). They’ve got a a SAS demo up with some Massachusetts death registry data. John Brownstein from HMS/Childrens spoke about his work on HealthMap.org which uses artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically search Google news and other media outlets for keywords to identify infectious disease outbreaks prior to formal alert mechanisms - given our relative temporal proximity to St. Patty’s I looked up Belfast, apparently they’re having E. coli issues. John Wieczorek spoke on automated building of probabilistic spatial models given point estimates and uncertain assumptions - they’re building tools to address these issues at BioGeomancer; here’s a beta of their Workbench.

Other notable speakers of less direct relevance to me - Paul Cote manages GIS systems for Harvard Graduate School of Design, A. Townsend Peterson (from KU…) maps bird migrations in Mexico, and Gregory Crane from Tufts (the ‘computational humanist’) runs the Perseus Project.