Research
Research Areas
The CGA leads and co-leads on research that blends spatial thinking and analysis, data infrastructure development, and domain-focused inquiry to address interdisciplinary challenges, including demography, climate, health, ecosystems, and historical mapping.
Health Geography and Spatial Health Analytics
The research areas CGA specializes in include health care access, mapping health disparities, and analyzing the spread of disease.
Some samples of recent work in these areas: deep learning to improve health outcomes, analyzing geographic access to pediatric services, determining health care access in Lesotho, and a spatio-temporal analysis of the spread of COVID-19 in Brazil.
Spatial AI and Data Science
Recent CGA work in machine learning and data science includes: optimizing LLMs to find place references in text, extraction of point level data from big raster datasets, and optimal route calculations from high resolution raster data.
Spatial Inequality
Spatial inequality can be defined as the observation of uneven attributes or outcomes over space, as well as the processes and structures producing that unevenness and the the impacts of those inequalities. CGA’s work explores the role of geography in shaping outcomes across the social, educational, occupational, health, and financial domains.
Recent CGA work exploring disparities includes: smart city sensor networks, climate change impact, telehealth and clinic access, neighborhood conditions linked to asthma, health deserts, and forms of ‘left-behindness’.
Spatial Data Infrastructure
The CGA was one of the first GIS centers to leverage cloud resources for geospatial purposes. We began working with Amazon AWS in 2007, and have expanded our abilities to the present, developing expertise with Mass Open Cloud, Microsoft Azure, New England Research Cloud, and Harvard’s super computer the FASRC.
The CGA has extensive experience building and maintaining spatial data infrastructures to support a wide variety of interdisciplinary research. The CGA developed the first modern open source mapping platform, Harvard WorldMap, and some of the first big spatial data exploration platforms in the academy, including TweetMap, the The Billion Object Platform (BOP), and HHypermap.
The CGA has also been a leader in making big spatial data and data analysis capabilities available to researchers. Some examples include The Geotweet Archive, BOP V2.0, RINX, K-Nearest Neighbor, Geospatial Extensions for KNIME, RapidRoute, CLIMB, and The Geography of Human Flourishing. Most recently, CGA is part of the Imago project, a UK-focused program of data infrastructure development focused on satellite imagery for social science, health, and public policy.
In addition, the CGA has lead in the area of historic mapping system development with the China Historical GIS, ChinaMap, the TGAZ gazetteer, AfricaMap, Mapping Past Societies, the Imperiia: Mapping the Russian Empire, HDV, and many others.
Other significant systems the CGA has developed or co-developed include: The Out of Eden Walk, The Japan Disaster Archive, and Resources for Estimating the Risk of Climate Hazards.