Research Cell - Hotspot Geoinformatic Research Activities

Geoinformatics surveillance for spatial and temporal hotspot detection and prioritization is a critical need for the 21st Century. A declared need is around for statistical geoinformatics and software infrastructure for spatial and spatiotemporal hotspot detection, prioritization, early warning, and sustainable management. A hotspot can mean an unusual phenomenon, anomaly, aberration, outbreak, elevated cluster, and critical area. The declared need may be for monitoring, etiology, early warning, or management. The responsible factors may be natural, accidental, or intentional.

The NSF DGP project, with Dr.G.P.Patil, Distinguished Professor, CSEES, Penn State University, USA as the “Principal Investigator”, has been instrumental to conceptualize surveillance geoinformatics partnership among several interested cross-disciplinary scientists in academia, agencies, and private sector across the nations.

Under his able leadership, JalaSRI efforts are driven by a wide variety of case studies of interest to agencies, academia, and private sector involving critical societal issues, such as public health, ecosystem health, ecohealth, financial health, biodiversity and threats to biodiversity, emerging infectious diseases, water management and conservation, persistent poverty, environmental justice, social networks, sensor networks, energy conservation, early warning, and disaster management. It involves research of space-time diseases, poverty, pollution, object identification and tracking, early detection, early warning, hotspot trajectories and trends. The project emphasis is on development of geoinformatic hotspot surveillance system. The system has two methodological components: hotspot detection and prioritization.

The methodology involves an innovation of the popular circle-based spatial scan statistic methodology. In particular, it employs the notion of an upper level set and is accordingly called the upper level set scan statistic system, pointing to the next generation of a sophisticated analytical and computational system, effective for the detection of arbitrarily shaped hotspots along spatio-temporal dimensions.

We propose a cross-disciplinary research collaboration to design and build the prototype system for surveillance infrastructure of hotspot detection and prioritization. The methodological toolbox and the software toolkit developed will support and leverage core missions of several agencies as well as their interactive counterparts in the society. The research advances in the allied sciences and technologies necessary to make such a system work are the thrust of this NSF DG Project.

The research efforts are driven by a wide variety of case studies of interest to agencies, academia, and private sector involving critical societal issues, such as public health, ecosystem health, ecohealth, financial health, biodiversity and threats to biodiversity, emerging infectious diseases, water management and conservation, sinks, sensor networks, persistent poverty, environmental justice, social networks, early warning, and disaster management. It involves research of space-time diseases, poverty, pollution, object identification and tracking, early detection, early warning, hotspot trajectories and trends. The major emphasis is on development of Hotspot Geoinformatic Surveillance System.

Back to Research Cell