CGA Wrapped—Our Year in Review
So long, 2025. What an eventful and interesting year! We were also quite busy...
We welcomed two new post-docs, a new executive director, visiting PhD students, and lots of visitors.
We moved our office space (although you can still find our amazing CGA lab space on the Concourse level of the Knafel Building, as always!).
We held our annual CGA conference in May on The Geography of Digital Twins which included a wide range of keynotes and seminar guests. It was the best attended since we started in 2006.
And, aside from that, we did all our usual things: lots of training and teaching, research and research support, and helping folks with their spatial data and analysis. We also made quite a few maps!
Let’s do the numbers*:
Grants canceled: 2
Grants reinstated: 2
Training the next generation of spatial researchers:
9 workshops
146 participants
Getting the word out about geography and GIS:
4 external collaborations
25 service projects
28 presentations
120 K-8th grade students exposed to the delights of geography
Always on call (handy ticketing system requests): 491
Other fun (big) numbers:
- A request to geocode 80 million addresses
- Computing 9 million OD pairs through OSRM platform
- Processing 4T of data for fire/precipitation/wind in Brazil
- Processing over 158 million data points from the 15TB PRISM climate dataset
- Processing 2.6 billion geolocated U.S. tweets for 10 years using fine-tuned large language models to classify expressions across 48 indicators of human flourishing
- Enriching 10 Billion tweets with 8.18 million census block parameters!
New Funded Projects: 4
Software packages released: 2
Conferences organized: 1 with 8 major talks, 4 panels, 30 presentations and over 300 attendees
Awards won: 4
Maps made (wild guesstimate): 63 (thanks, #30DayMapChallenge)
CGA led or co-authored papers: 43
A few of our favorites papers or articles from this year:
Blossom, J. (2025) Measuring the Out of Eden Walk’s Milestones and Calculating Distances Between Them
Franklin, R. (2025). “All Theories Are Wrong but Some Are Useful,” Dialogues in Human Geography
Frazier, A., Nelson, T., Kedron, P., Shook, E., Dodge, S., Murray, A., Goodchild, M., Battersby, S., Blanford, J., Claramunt, C., Holler, J, Koylu, C., Lee, A., Manson, S., Şalap-Ayça, S., Wilson, J., Zhao, B, Bennett, L.,m C., Franklin, F., McKenzie, G., Miller, H., Oshan, T., Rey S., Rowe, F., Spielman, S., Xu, W. (2025). “Rethinking GIScience Education in an Age of Disruptions,” Transactions in GIS
Jain, D., Kachinovsky, J., Rodriguez, G., Chen, J., Kim, R., & Subramanian, S. V. (2025). India Policy Insights: A geospatial and temporal data science and visualization platform and architecture. SoftwareX, 30, Article 102149.
Jain, D., Blossom, J., Hayes, J., Gibson, H., Rifas-Shimann, S., Gold, D. (2025) RINX 2.0: A Containerized Climate Raster Information Extraction System on OpenShift Cloud Environment. ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., X-G-2025, 391–395
Mehdi, L., Velthuis, S., Royer, J., Cauchi-Duval, N., Franklin, R., Leibert, T., MacKinnon, D., Pike, A. (2025). “Trajectories of regional ‘left-behindness’ in the EU15 from 1982 to 2017,” Advances in Economic Geography (ZFW)
Liu, L., Onega, T., Moen, E. L., Tosteson, A. N., Smith, R. E., Wang, Q., Cowan, L., Wang, F. (2025). Digital divides in telehealth accessibility for cancer care in the United States. NPJ digital medicine, 8(1), 534. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01931-5
Wang, Z., Masri, Y., Malarvizhi, A. S., Stover, T., Ahmed, S., Wong, D., Yang, C. (2025). Optimizing context-based location extraction by tuning open-source LLMs with RAG. International Journal of Digital Earth, 18(1).
Top research computing GPU consumption: 1+ Million GPU hours (Geography of Human Flourishing Project)
Happy Holidays from CGA!
