Xuan Shi

Near repeat (NR) is a well known phenomenon in crime analysis assuming that crime events exhibit correlations within a given time and space frame. Traditional NR calculation generates 2 event pairs if 2 events happened within a given space and time limit. When the number of events is large, however, NR calculation is time consuming and how these pairs are organized are not yet explored. In this paper, we designed a new approach to calculate clusters of NR events efficiently. To begin with, R-tree is utilized to index crime events, a single event is represented by a vertex whereas edges are constructed by range querying the vertex in R-tree, and a graph is formed. Cohesive subgraph approaches are applied to identify the event chains. k-clique, k-truss, k-core plus DBSCAN algorithms are implemented in sequence with respect to their varied range of ability to find cohesive subgraphs. Real world crime data in Chicago, New York and Washington DC are utilized to conduct experiments. The experiment confirmed that near repeat is a solid effect in real big crime data by conducting Mapreduce empowered knox tests. The performance of 4 different algorithms are validated, while the quality of the algorithms are gauged by the distribution of number of cohesive subgraphs and their clustering coefficients. The proposed framework is the first to process the real crime data of million record scale, and is the first to detect NR events with size of more than 2.

High spectral, spatial, vertical and temporal resolution data are increasingly available and result in the serious challenge to process big remote-sensing images effectively and efficiently. This article introduced how to conduct supervised image classification by implementing maximum likelihood classification (MLC) over big image data on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) cloud. By comparing our prior work of implementing MLC on conventional cluster of multicore computers and graphics processing unit, it can be concluded that FPGAs can achieve the best performance in comparison to conventional CPU cluster and K40 GPU, and are more energy efficient. The proposed pipelined thread approach can be extended to other image-processing solutions to handle big data in the future.

Digital earth science data originated from sensors aboard satellites and platforms such as airplane, UAV, and mobile systems are increasingly available with high spectral, spatial, vertical, and temporal resolution data. When such big earth science data are processed and analyzed via geocomputation solutions, or utilized in geospatial simulation or modeling, considerable computing power and resources are necessary to complete the tasks. While classic computer clusters equipped by central processing units (CPUs) and the new computing resources of graphics processing units (GPUs) have been deployed in handling big earth data, coprocessors based on the Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture are emerging and adopted in many high-performance computer clusters. This paper introduces how to efficiently utilize Intel’s Xeon Phi multicore processors and MIC coprocessors for scalable geocomputation and geo-simulation by implementing two algorithms, Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) and Cellular Automata (CA), on supercomputer Beacon, a cluster of MICs. Four different programming models are examined, including (1) the native model, (2) the offload model, (3) the symmetric model, and (4) the hybrid-offload model. It can be concluded that while different kinds of parallel programming models can enable big data handling efficiently, the hybrid-offload model can achieve the best performance and scalability. These different programming models can be applied and extended to other types of geocomputation to handle big earth data.

Spatiotemporal computation implements a variety of different algorithms. When big data are involved, desktop computer or standalone application may not be able to complete the computation task due to limited memory and computing power. Now that a variety of hardware accelerators and computing platforms are available to improve the performance of geocomputation, different algorithms may have different behavior on different computing infrastructure and platforms. Some are perfect for implementation on a cluster of graphics processing units (GPUs), while GPUs may not be useful on certain kind of spatiotemporal computation. This is the same situation in utilizing a cluster of Intel's many-integrated-core (MIC) or Xeon Phi, as well as Hadoop or Spark platforms, to handle big spatiotemporal data. Furthermore, considering the energy efficiency requirement in general computation, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) may be a better solution for better energy efficiency when the performance of computation could be similar or better than GPUs and MICs. It is expected that an elastic cloud computing architecture and system that integrates all of GPUs, MICs, and FPGAs could be developed and deployed to support spatiotemporal computing over heterogeneous data types and computational problems.

Introduced in 2007, affinity propagation (AP) is a relatively new machine learning algorithm for unsupervised classification that has seldom been applied in geospatial applications. One bottleneck is that AP could hardly handle large data, and a serial computer program would take a long time to complete an AP calculation. New multicore and manycore computer architectures, combined with application accelerators, show promise for achieving scalable geocomputation by exploiting task and data levels of parallelism. This chapter introduces our recent progress in parallelizing the AP algorithm on a graphics processing unit (GPU) for spatial cluster analysis, the potential of the proposed solution to process big geospatial data, and its broader impact for the GIScience community.

In response to the widespread concern about the adequacy, distribution, and disparity of access to a health care workforce, the correct identification of physicians’ practice locations is critical to access public health services. In prior literature, little effort has been made to detect and resolve the uncertainty about whether the address provided by a physician in the survey is a practice address or a home address. This paper introduces how to identify the uncertainty in a physician’s practice location through spatial analytics, text mining, and visual examination. While land use and zoning code, embedded within the parcel datasets, help to differentiate resident areas from other types, spatial analytics may have certain limitations in matching and comparing physician and parcel datasets with different uncertainty issues, which may lead to unforeseen results. Handling and matching the string components between physicians’ addresses and the addresses of the parcels could identify the spatial uncertainty and instability to derive a more reasonable relationship between different datasets. Visual analytics and examination further help to clarify the undetectable patterns. This research will have a broader impact over federal and state initiatives and policies to address both insufficiency and maldistribution of a health care workforce to improve the accessibility to public health services.