Research Portfolio
Below is a list of selected projects conducted or supported by the CGA, sorted newest to oldest:
Building Spatial Data Infrastructure
This work, funded by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research to strengthen Harvard's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) infrastructure, enables researchers to execute geospatial Big Data and Data Science projects, across diverse research use cases...
Spatiotemporal Innovation Center
Spatiotemporal Innovation Center Everything happens in space and time. From natural disasters to human catastrophes; from public health to energy sustainability; from urban growth to food security; 21st-century challenges call for a deep understanding of...
Acknowledgements
We extend our gratitude to the Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) at Harvard University for funding this work. We would like to thank our collaborators at FAS Research Computing (FASRC) and the New England Research Cloud (NERC) for providing...
CLIMB: Climate-Induced Migration in Africa and Beyond: Big Data and Predictive Analytics
About the CLIMB project Climate change (interlinked with humanitarian crises and other economic and health factors) could lead to internal resettlement, international migration, and other (new) forms of human mobility. However, the empirical link between...
Map of Inclusive Symbols and Spaces
Harvard's Map of Inclusive Symbols and Spaces (MISS) was unveiled on June 6th, 2023 at the Harvard IT Summit. The map was made posssible by a CLIF grant and is sponsored by Harvard’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Harvard Business...
Identifying outlier patterns of inconsistent ambulance billing in Medicare
For this project the CGA used county data and the ArcGIS "Disperse points" tool to create the map below, featured in the publication: Identifying outlier patterns of inconsistent ambulance billing in Medicare.
Network Analysis on Geospatial Big Data in Brazil
Network Analysis is a commonly encountered problem in GIS. Researchers are increasingly working with big geospatial datasets that contain millions of records. At this scale, traditional GIS methods of network analysis fall short and new approaches are...
Mangrove Forests Mapping
Coastal mangrove forests provide important ecosystem goods and services, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and hazard mitigation. However, they are being destroyed at an alarming rate by human activities. To characterize mangrove...
Infogroup US Historical Business Dataset Analysis
This project involved creating geospatial measures for ~2,000 public firms from the Infogroup US Historical Business Dataset. One of the tasks involved calculating the following variables at the census block group level from the dataset for 23 years of...
Detroit Zoning Analysis
The list of work order tickets for Detroit provided by the researcher was converted into a GIS polygon data set containing 355,500 polygons using Python script in ArcGIS Pro. Polygons were mapped using the string of coordinates found in the “Polygon”...
Use of Social Media data to study Climate Change
Harvard CGA joined forces with MIT SUL in 2021 to use social media data to study the effects of climate change on people’s well being. To achieve this objective, we developed the Twitter Sentiment Global Index (TSGI) dataset, an open dataset for...
High Performance Computing for Address Level Climate Data Extraction
A key objective of multiple public health researchers the CGA works with is to find ways to improve the health of cohort members by calculating various social and environmental exposures at cohort member address locations. To aid this project objective...
Mapping Ancient Landscapes
Racing against the clock as development encroaches on important Kurdish heritage sites, a team of landscape archaeologists deploys drones and comparative image analysis to capture previously undetected ancient settlements. This project features research...
Spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 spread in Brazil
In collaboration with Dr. Marcia Castro of the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health, the CGA analyzed the pattern of spread of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Brazil from February to October 2020. Weekly geographic centroids locations weighted by...
COVID-19 Impact on Mortality of Various Causes in the United States
This project analyzed CDC published mortality data of a dozen major causes since 1999, and applied the Exponential Smoothing (ETS) algorithm to simulate the 2020 mortality rates per cause, per month and per state, assuming there was no COVID-19 pandemic...
RAPID: Building a Spatiotemporal Platform for Rapid Response to COVID 19
Sponsored by NSF, this project is to build a comprehensive data repository of virus cases, associated social and natural information from different resources for sustainable archive; share data with the research communities through smart data discovery...
COVID-19 Metrics for United States Congressional Districts
Nearly a year into the global pandemic, data on COVID-19 metrics for the United States Congressional Districts (CD) had not been readily available. Yet, having access to such data can substantially enhance the ability of elected officials and the...
Geospatial data science tools and data on Harvard's High Performance Computing Cluster (HHPCC)
In collaboration with OmniSci Technologies and the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center, and in close coordination with Harvard Research Computing (FASRC), the CGA has deployed the OmniSci GPU database and PostGIS, on Harvard's large computation cluster....
Surgical Safety Web Map
A web map was created to aid the dissemenation of the Surgical Safety Checklist. The Surgical Safety team used the map to display participating hospital locations, and upload new hospital information and locations. Work performed for Dr. Atul Gawande...
Measurement of partisan segregation for 180 million U.S. voters using advanced geospatial data science
Partisan segregation among people has important political and social implications. Historically, such measurements have been limited to county levels but this innovative work enabled Harvard researchers to analyze partisanship down to the level of...
Geographic Apportioning of Health Indicators for Policy Relevant Decision Making
For elected officials to best represent constituencies they serve, information must be presented and analyzed for the entire geographic extent of their constituency. Health indicators are often collected and reported at census geographies, or other units...
Feasting with the Gods - Harvard Art Musuems
This project provided print publication maps and a dynamic web-map (in progress) in conjunction with the exhibit, " Animal-Shaped Vessels from the Ancient World: Feasting with Gods, Heroes, and Kings" on display at the Harvard Art Museums from September...
Spectrometry-derived Ecosystem Composition
Moorcroft Lab Recent technological advances in remote sensing are moving terrestrial ecosystem monitoring beyond land cover change mapping, in the form of imaging spectrometry able to detect light intensity from tens to hundreds of contiguous spectral...
U.S. Air Pollution Modeling
CGA created maps that display PM 2.5 and Ozone for the US by County from 2000 - 2012, which involved cross-tabulation of monitoring sites within county boundaries. Investigators: Francesca Dominici and Christine Choirat, Department of Biostatistics, HSPH...
Out of Eden Walk
The Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. Sponsored and hosted by...
WorldMap / Dataverse Integration
Dataverse and WorldMap have been integrated by adding APIs to both systems (Funded by the Boston Research Initiative) Three types of Dataverse file: Tables with columns containing latitude and longitude Tables with a column of known codes which represent...
OmniSci (formerly MapD) - explore the power of GPUs in spatiotemporal analytics
Funded by OmniSci Technologies, LLC. as a member of the I/UCRC Spatiotemporal Innovation Center Can be hosted on Harvard Cannon Cluster, Amazon AWS, Mass Open Cloud, MapD Cloud. Use cases: Improving access to hydrological models used in water management...
Japanese Old Maps Online
Toward an Open Platform for Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Based on WorldMap, this project will host historical maps of Japan. Funded by Ritsumeikan University. Investigator: Prof. Keiji Yano , Professor of Geography and GIS Science at...
Chinese Academic Mapping Platform
A new collaboration between Zhejiang University and Harvard was launched on October 13th, 2017. The joint effort will build upon Harvard CGA's WorldMap to develop a Chinese Academic Mapping Platform for research, teaching, and data sharing. Please see the...
