Guest speaker Carmen Cabrera-Arnau, lecturer in Geographic Data Science at the University of Liverpool’s Geographic Data Science Lab (GDSL), visited UJI in the realm of the SJL006 Data Science module, that’s part of the Erasmus Mundus master in Geospatial Technologies.

Carmen first introduced GDSL, staff, and main domain of study in her group: Land, Retail, Health, Mobility. GIScience methods and techniques are cross-cutting to all of these domains. She briefly showed some key results in mobility such as how human mobility changes in response to crises and on measuring conflict-induced population displacement. She is involved in a existing programme called Smart Data Research UK, which seems to be a research data store/service for research and industry.

Next, she explained the most fundamental concepts and methods of Network Analysis using a cloud-based instance of RStudio available on posit.cloud. After introducing the basic concepts of graph creation and plotting, students were prompted with a real data set to create and compute different network metrics such as centrality and distances with a network of African roads constructed by considering all continental cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants as nodes. What was most interesting is the application part that covered two case studies. The first one was about community detection using three different methods. The second application focused on analysing network resilience, which makes a lot of sense for simulating, for example, interruptions in the transport network.