Recommended Readings

This page provides some recommended readings (e.g., Why GIScience matters, and  how to carry out research effectively).

About Why GIScience Matters

(PDF if not retrievable)

“Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are ways to organize, present, and analyze spatial and geographic data. You probably don’t realize it, but Waze or Google Maps fall within the realm of GISscience. Both of these apps likely benefit you daily. The Johns Hopkins University is maintaining an excellent Coronavirus tracking website, which gathers information from multiple data sources. “

 

“The coming-out party for AI is due to three factors, according to Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of artificial intelligence and research at Microsoft. The first is the massive compute power now available in the cloud or on premises, which allows data to be processed into insight. The second is the data unleashed by digital transformation, including sensors that relay information via the Internet of Things (IoT), GPS and mobile devices that report accurate locations, and innumerable other sources. Sirosh calls data the oxygen of artificial intelligence.”

‘The third pillar of AI is the algorithms that fuel its intelligence. Recent innovations have provided AI with “the ability for computers to learn from every type of data, make predictions, and act without being programmed explicitly,” Sirosh says.’

“Together, those forces help AI mimic—and in some cases, outperform—humans’ abilities to see, analyze, communicate with, and make predictions about the world around them.”

 

“AI, informed by location data, helps organizations reason and interact with the increasingly sophisticated world around us,” Sirosh says.

“If I had to put it in one term,” Menon adds, “AI is basically about decision-making—smarter decision making.”

 

 

‘As Raad emphasized in [153], “When data volume swells beyond a human’s ability to discern the patterns in it … GIS, infused with artificial intelligence, can help executives make better decisions”, we share the same vision that GIScience researchers need to bring M&DL into our community, and start to build GeoAI.’ (From Yang et al 2018)

GeoAI related quotes

(Credits: Some of the quotes above got from Prof. Stephan Winter ‘s website at here.)

GeoAI quotes

        • “This geospatial stuff is going to get bigger, faster than anybody thinks.” (Kevin Kelly, former WIRED editor)
        • “Maps become a user interface to many things […]
          Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information.”           (Financial Times 21.5.2008)
        • “We have to do better at producing tools to support the whole research cycle from data capture and data curation to data analysis and data visualization.” (by Jim Gray 2007)

    • Quotes about Computer Vision and AI by Fei-Fei Li 

        • “I consider the pixel data in images and video to be the dark matter of the Internet.”

        • “Understanding vision and building visual systems is really understanding intelligence.”

        • “The only path to build intelligent machines is to enable it with powerful visual intelligence, just like what animals did in evolution.”
        • “No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years. They learn this through real-world experiences and examples.”
        • “As nature discovered early on, vision is one of the most powerful secret weapons of an intelligent animal to navigate, survive, interact, and change the complex world it lives in.”
        • “More than 500 million years ago, vision became the primary driving force of evolution’s ‘big bang’, the Cambrian Explosion, which resulted in explosive speciation of the animal kingdom. 500 million years later, AI technology is at the verge of changing the landscape of how humans live, work, communicate,and shape our environment.”
        • “We all have a responsibility to make sure everyone – including companies, governments, and researchers – develop AI with diversity in mind.”

About How to Carry Out Research Effectively

(PDF if it is not retrieval)

(PDF if it is not retrievable)

Zeller, S., and D. Rogers (2020), Visualizing science: How color determines what we see, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO144330. Published on 21 May 2020.

“Color plays a major role in the analysis and communication of scientific information. New tools are helping to improve how color can be applied more accurately and effectively to data.”

The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with visualization pioneer Ben Shneiderman

(PDF if it is not retrievable)

 

 

About Time Management

The best time management strategy I have seen so far. Try it, you will see it is effective. I have a chance to work and interact with Dr. Devi Parikh for my DIRA workshop at CVPR 2020, she is super nice, very friendly, knowledgeable  and very productive.  Most importantly, she has a great heart that is willing to help others to do better. You can feel this through her wonderful time management post.

(by Amantha Imber; Harvard Business Review; February 05, 2021 )

Summary.   

Ever come out of a 12-hour workday feeling exhausted, yet not productive enough? We spend our days trying to tick things off our to-do list, and still, it feels like we haven’t done enough, or worse, haven’t been efficient. How we can be more productive in ways that feel manageable and good?

      • Align your most important work with your chronotype. Schedule work that requires your most intense brain power with your energy peaks.
      • Plan your day the night before. Do it at the end of your workday so that whatever needs to be tackled tomorrow is still fresh in your head.
      • Develop different rituals (like where and when you work) for different types of tasks. Over time, your brain will associate those physical and temporal cues with those tasks.
      • Avoid blocking your calendar 100%. A fully blocked day can give you a false sense of productivity and leaves no time for moments of creativity and inspiration.

 

Fun fact: 96% percent of people check their mobile phone within one hour of waking up in the morning (and a whopping 61% take a peek within the first five minutes).

While it may seem harmless, checking our phones as soon as we open our eyes sets us up to have a “reactive” kind of day.

Think about it.

If the first thing you do when you roll out of bed is open your email, read your texts, or listen to your voicemails, you are essentially putting yourself second. Whether good, bad, or no news awaits, you are letting other people set your mood for the day.

Rankings

2021 Ranking of Top 1000 Journals in the field of Computer Science and Electronics

2021 Ranking of Top 1000 Scientists in the field of Computer Science and Electronics

Top Computer Science Conferences

 

 

Miscellany

How Programming Affects Your Brain? 3 Big Truths Backed by Science (May 19, 2021 by Nishi) [PDF]

Stop Eliminating Perfectly Good Candidates by Asking Them the Wrong Questions (March 22, 2019 by Nilofer Merchant ) [PDF]

Summary.

“Assessing a job candidate is all about the questions you ask during the interview. But too often leaders ask the wrong things, focusing more on what the interviewee has done in the past rather than what they can do in the future. If you need to hire someone to work on an innovation project, make sure you’re asking questions that get to their ability to collaboratively problem solve. For example, you want to know how they would handle particular problem-solving situations rather than whether they’ve done exactly what you’re looking for in the past. You should assess whether they are able and willing to fill in gaps on teams when it becomes clear a particular role isn’t being filled. And, it’s important to understand what they’re passionate about working on. Innovation happens when you bring people with different passions and approaches together to work toward the same goal.”

Excerpts

“Too many applicants are screened out because they don’t fit a particular pattern – one survey found as many as 75% of resumes don’t make it past Applicant Tracking Systems. “

“An employer seeks to learn about the candidate’s skills and relevant experiences. And a good candidate uses questions to learn about the role, the boss, and the company to assess whether it’s the right job. Here are some types of questions the VP might’ve asked — and the ones you should ask — to avoid screening out a perfectly good candidate based on the wrong criteria.“

      • Questions that uncover capabilities, not just experience.
        • Instead of asking, “Have you done x or y or z?” you want to ask, “How would you approach doing x or y or z?” This shift in question lets you learn someone’s capacity to think with you.
        • Unfortunately, right now, an estimated 77% of all jobs (60% in the U.S. and 80% worldwide) require little to no creativity, decision-making, or independent judgment. But if you are working on innovation, you need someone who can think with you. And by focusing on capability over experience, you increase the chances you find that person. 
      • Questions that assess whether they can co-create on a team.
        • When I ask the teams I’ve worked with in the last 10 years why their last major strategic effort failed, they rarely mention that the team didn’t get along.
        • Teams need to figure out new terrain together. You might ask candidates, “How would you handle a situation where it’s become clear that there is a gap on your team?”
        • Interviewees are often told to use “I” to get credit for work done, but “we” is probably a more realistic depiction of how work gets done. Then follow up to learn how they felt about the situation: Were they proud of catching the gap? Concerned that it existed in the first place?
        • This will help you see if you are dealing with a team player or a know-it-all. You want to find people who can play together, filling in the gaps between predefined roles to get the work done.
      • Questions that uncover the kinds of things they love to work on.

If you’re hiring for innovation, you need to ask what this person authentically brings to work.

Ideas, after all, are not invented and grown in a vacuum; they grow and evolve by connecting previously separate elements.

Figuring out what people genuinely care about lets you put people together who don’t have the same approaches but who want to reach the same goal. It’s that connection where innovation happens.

But people need to be united around a shared purpose and focused on something that has meaning to them.

Ask candidates, “What did you find meaningful about that project? What does that particular success say about what matters to you?” People want to match their purpose to the organizations they work for. And it’s your job as the leader to align that purpose so that seemingly disparate people can come together into an “us” headed in the same direction.

“Too often, leaders screen out perfectly good candidates because they don’t understand how to hire people for co-creative problem solving. It’s easy to forget that the job of a leader isn’t to know all the answers but to create the conditions by which the entire team gets to learn and innovate.“