Spatial Synthesis: Computational Social Science and Humanities (Human Dynamics in Smart Cities)

This book describes how powerful computing technology, emerging big and open data sources, and theoretical perspectives on spatial synthesis have revolutionized the way in which we investigate social sciences and humanities. It summarizes the principles and applications of human-centered computing and spatial social science and humanities research, thereby providing fundamental information that will help shape future research. The book illustrates how big spatiotemporal socioeconomic data facilitate the modelling of individuals’ economic behavior in space and time and how the outcomes of such models can reveal information about economic trends across spatial scales. It describes how spatial social science and humanities research has shifted from a data-scarce to a data-rich environment. The chapters also describe how a powerful analytical framework for identifying space-time research gaps and frontiers is fundamental to comparative study of spatiotemporal phenomena, and how research topics have evolved from structure and function to dynamic and predictive. As such this book provides an interesting read for researchers, students and all those interested in computational and spatial social sciences and humanities.

Dr. Xinyue Ye (Ph.D., University of California at Santa Barbara and San Diego State University, USA) is Associate Professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA. Dr. Ye integrates urban science and computational science towards smart cities and spatial social network research. He models the space-time perspective of socioeconomic inequality and human dynamics for applications in various domains, such as economic development, disaster response, transportation and land use, public health, and urban crime.  He was elected chair of the American Association of Geographers (AAG)’s Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group in 2014. He also served as president of the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Science from 2016 to 2017. Since 2011, he has been serving as Associate Editor of Stochastic Environmental Research & Risk Assessment, a leading SCI journal in spatial and environmental statistical modeling. Dr. Ye has published over 150 journal articles. He won the national first-place research award from University Economic Development Association in 2011 and received the Regional Development and Planning emerging scholar award from AAG in 2012. Dr. Ye’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Justice, Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Dr. Hui Lin (Ph.D., University at Buffalo, USA) is Professor and Dean at the School of Geography and Environment of Jiangxi Normal University (JXNU), Nanchang, China. He is also Emeritus Professor at the Department of Geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He was the founding director of Institute of Space and Earth Information Science of CUHK (2005-2019) and the founding president of International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences (CPGIS) in 1992. Dr. Lin’smajor research interests include environmental remote sensing, virtual geographic environments (VGE), and spatially integrated humanities and social sciences. He has authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers, 12 books and 1 atlas. He was honoured as guest professorships from universities in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, and USA. Dr. Lin received CPGIS Distinguished Scholar Award in 2015, the Outstanding Contribution Award from Asia Association of Remote Sensing (AARS) in 2009 and 2019, and the E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award from American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2017. He was elected the academician of International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (IEAS) in 1995, Member of Scientific Committee of the International Center on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage (WHIST), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011, and Vice Chairman, China National Committee of International Society of Digital Earth in 2012.