The rapidly increasing information universe, with new data created at a speed surpassing our capacities to store it, calls for improved methods to retrieve, filter, integrate, and share data. The vision of a Big Data science entails the hope that the open availability of data with a higher spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution will enable us to better address complex scientific and social questions. However, on the downside, understanding, sharing, and reusing these data continually becomes more challenging. Big Data is not only big because it involves a huge amount of data, but also because of the high-dimensionality and inter-linkage of the involved data sets. The on-the-fly integration of heterogeneous data from various sources has been named one of the frontiers of Digital Earth research, Bioinformatics, the Digital Humanities, and other emerging research visions. As part of the Reginald Golledge Distinguished Lectureship in Geography, the Department presents an open panel to discuss the arising research challenges for Geographic Information Science in the Big Data age. Panelists include Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois, USA; Mark Gahegan, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Mike Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; Werner Kuhn, University of Muenster, Germany; Mark Schildhauer, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; and Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, USA. More about the Big Data panel discussion can be found here.
The panel discussion will take place on Friday, 3 February, 4:30 – 6:00 pm, in 1930 Buchanan. This will be the 27th occurrence of the Reginald Golledge Distinguished Lectureship in Geography. Professor Reginald Golledge joined the Department in 1977, served as Chair 1980-1984, and died in 2009. The lectureship was instituted in 1984 when Golledge lost his sight. Without vision, keeping abreast of ongoing research in his fields of interest was a major problem for Reg, so the Department, with backing from Professors Waldo Tobler and David Simonett, established a named Distinguished Lecture Series to enable Reg to invite scholars of his choice to the department for 3-4 days a year and to interact with them personally. Contributions were solicited from the Discipline and from Department members, and a fund was set up with the UCSB Development office to help pay the expenses of bringing in such a person. The Golledge Lecture is, indeed, a “distinguished lecture” that is widely recognized across the discipline and is a part of our departmental image, having been one of the academically evaluated dimensions of this department since 1985.
Editor’s note: Many thanks to Professor Krzysztof Janowicz for organizing this important event and for providing the materials used to promote it.