Current research and project at UIS

MIT@Lawrence

MIT@Lawrence is a university-community partnership that connects faculty, students and staff at MIT with community-based organizations and civic leaders in the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts. It is a model of scholarly engagement that integrates planning research, education and practice in ways that promote affordable housing development, economic development through asset-building, and youth development. Recent projects include a digital story narrated by victims of predatory lending, produced in collaboration with MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, that has been aired on public access television and YouTube as a form of community outreach and education. The "What's Up" project, done in partnership with the Media Lab, is a telephone-based, neighborhood news system that makes it easier for youth to collect, share, and analyze information about personally meaningful places, people, and opportunities in their neighborhoods. For more information about MIT@Lawrence or to learn about related employment opportunities, go to www.MITatLawrence.net.

FutureBoston

FutureBoston examines the competitive challenges Boston faces in an increasingly globalized world, and how the city and region can address them. Convened by State Street Corp. and MIT, the project is a multi-year civic dialogue -- online and in person -- aimed at developing recommendations and proposals in three topic areas: Health, Design, and Sustainability. FutureBoston uses collaborative web technologies and advanced mapping to explore these issues in new and revealing ways. More information.

Intelligent Middleware for Understanding Urban Markets

The Intelligent Middleware project prototypes and tests an approach for sharing data within a metropolitan area in a manner that is likely to be more effective, scalable, and sustainable than the traditional 'data center' approach. These tools and methods provide a mechanism for accumulating local knowledge about neighborhood-scale land use, ownership, and market potential and for using that knowledge to re-interpret administrative datasets and develop customized analyses of neighborhood conditions and market potential. Visit the middleware site.

SENSEable Cities Lab

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory. Recent projects include iFind, MIT's new location-based application for friendspotting, and Real Time Rome for the Venice Biennale.

Simulating Sustainable Futures

Michael Flaxman's GIS modeling workshop has used scenarios to explore different ecological and economic outcomes in Mexico and Spain.

Research Archive

E-Neighborhood

Prof. Keith Hampton's E-Neighborhood project is an NSF-funded longitudinal study of how new information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to build local social capital. In Spring 2002 the residents of four Boston area neighborhoods completed detailed surveys on technology use, community involvement, and personal and neighborhood social networks. In the Summer 2002 three of these neighborhoods were given access to a series of services designed to facilitate communication and information sharing at the neighborhood level. Follow-up surveys comparing the three experimental and the control neighborhood are being continued during the next two years.

The (in)effectiveness of job-housing balance as a congestion relief strategy

Prof. Joseph Ferreira is working with PhD candidate Jiawen Yang to study the dynamic relationship between job-housing distribution and commuting patterns in two American metropolitan areas, Boston and Atlanta. The purpose of this research is 1) to reveal the urban growth trends in the last two decades and the commuting implication of this spatial process; 2) to uncover the causal relationship between job-housing distribution and commuting duration from both a spatial perspective and a longitudinal perspective. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation through the Region One (New England) University Transportation Center.

Employment Accessibility, Transit Services, and Welfare-To-Work Transitions

A high percentage of welfare recipients in the United States must rely on public transit to reach their places of employment. This situation has allowed several factors--including employment decentralization, housing segregation, and inadequate transit service--to combine to create a major "spatial" obstacle to welfare reform. A project undertaken by Prof. Qing Shen examined this problem in the case of the Boston metropolitan area, aiming to shed new light onto the search for innovative and effective transit programs to facilitate welfare-to-work transitions. The goals of the study were threefold: to gather valuable information on the spatial distributions of welfare recipients, their job opportunities, and their most-needed services such as daycare centers; to understand the underlying spatial relationships by constructing proper accessibility indicators; and to determine whether or not there have been noticeable changes in welfare recipients' residential and travel choices since the implementation of the welfare reform and to explain why. This study was funded by the New England University Transportation Center.

Spatial Patterns in Office Growth in the Boston Metropolitan Area

Understanding the spatial pattern of office growth is critically important for decision makers in both local governments and in the real estate industry. This project addressed several methodological issues regarding the description, explanation, and prediction of intra-metropolitan distribution of office space: can GIS' spatial-data-processing capability help us to construct better statistical models of office growth, using more accurately determined variables? Can we refine these models using GIS' visualization capability? The project team, using the office market of the Boston metropolitan area as a case study, developed and tested statistical models of office growth and rent that include variables measuring access to labor force, business amenities, community amenities, agglomeration effects, and building characteristics. This project was sponsored by State Street Research (SSR) and directed by Professors Joseph Ferreira, Qing Shen, and William Wheaton. Research staff included Michael Allen and Thomas Grayson. The project team worked closely with Lijian Chen and Fred Lieblich of SSR in pursuing the research objective.

Spatial Multimedia for Public Discourse

How can emerging technologies help planners and the public as they cooperate on planning projects? For several years, Dr. Michael Shiffer's research has focused on ways in which Spatial Multimedia-a combination of audio, video, and spatial analysis tools-can give citizens better access to planning-related debate, keep consituents better informed on planning issues, and help planners and the public communicate more effectively in planning contexts. For example, in a public meeting on a proposed transportation change, a transportation model, in combination with video and audio clips illustrating different traffic levels, could help citizens debate the question with a clear sense of "how crowded the streets would be." Spatial Multimedia becomes an especially powerful tool when combined with Web technology, allowing citizens to survey planning data, communicate with other stakeholders and the government, and even add their own personal recollections, anecdotes, and opinions to the data. Uses of Spatial Multimedia have been explored in several cooperative investigations, including a US Dept. of Transportation project using multimedia and wide-area networks to transmit transportation information to the general public; a project to distribute planning information throughout metropolitan planning organizations (MPO's); and student projects on representing public housing revitalization in Boston, developing a community-based information system to help facilitate development in the City of St. Louis, and delivering spatially-referenced multimedia data for site planning and review in Washington, DC.

Developing Sustainable Spatial Data Infrastructures

Prof. Joseph Ferreira and colleagues have studied the spatial data infrastructure needed to support urban planning processes and related analyses. One multi-year project has involved web service strategies for delivering customized snippets of georeferenced high resolution imagery. The project began in 1995 with Federal Geographic Data Committee funding to build network tools for delivering orthophotography. What makes these photos special is that they are 1) orthographic -they look at the earth from a bird's eye view (like a map), and 2) they are "rectified" -they can be used as a "layer" underneath other types of geographic information such as census statistics or streets. The Massachusetts Geographic Information System (MassGIS), which has been creating orthophotos that will cover the entire Commonwealth, joined forces with a team from the Planning Support Systems group (now called Urban Information Systems) to make this intriguing resource available on the World-Wide Web (WWW). Initially, Thomas Grayson (then, our GIS/Database Specialist) along with Ph.D. Candidate John Evans (now graduated and working with NASA on 'digital earth' issues) and Prof. Ferreira comprised the MIT team. Together, they sought to provide access to both the images and to their "metadata"--information describing the images to potential users. The initial web service, funded by the Federal Geographic Data Committee provided customized snippets of Boston area orthophotos and went online in 1996. Subsequent work with the Open GIS Consortium, the US Department of Agriculture, NOAA, and others has helped develop interoperable standards for geospatial web service and has involved significant work by several other students including Nadine Alameh and Raj Singh. See ortho.mit.edu for more information.

Mission Main Collaboration

UIS has continued to work with DUSP's "Housing, Community, and Economic Development" group on urban revitalization issues, especially as they relate to the ongoing urban revitalization demonstration programs underway at Boston's Mission Hill and Orchard Park housing developments. Tom Grayson, the department's GIS and database specialist, has assembled a growing body of census and parcel-level data about several Boston neighborhoods, and he has organized the data so that much of it is accessible via the Net, using various database and GIS tools. Working with UIS faculty and several UIS students, Tom has used these data and tools in several DUSP classes (such as the Spring GIS workshop) giving students the chance to work with real-world data and providing perspective on agency collaboration.

Tools to Facilitate Networked Access to Digital Orthophotos
We are designing an interactive Web interface to view a set of orthophoto images of the Boston area at several different zoom levels, with pan, zoom, and download functionality. The site includes FGDC-compliant metadata with fielded, full-text indexes searchable via the Z39.50 protocol as part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Clearinghouse effort.

Online Tools for Community Planning and Public Involvement
Slides and animations of a recent presentation that describes how information technology (such as multimedia representational aids and the Internet) can be employed to effectively communicate the past, present and future of a community.

Experimenting with Multimedia Representational Aids for Transportation Planners
Several research projects that explore how to effectively deliver abstract information related to transportation plans and projects to planners using multimedia representational aids.

Online Guide to Information Technologies and Tools for Planning
The results of an investigation into how emerging information technologies could improve the processing and communication of planning-related information in metropolitan planning organizations (MPO's).

Boston's Waterfront Development & The Central Artery
A student project from Fall, 1996 that dynamically explores the past, present and future of Boston's waterfront. This site is particularly interesting in the light of the region's rich history juxtaposed with the largest public works project in the country, "The Big Dig" -the depression of Boston's Central Artery.

Washington, DC Site Planning Aid
A demonstration project from Spring,1996 that explores how to deliver spatially-referenced multimedia material for site planning and review purposes with Washington, DC providing the context. This is an updated version of an earlier (1994) project.

Visions for the South Boston Seaport
A student project from Spring, 1998 that explores the past, present and future of South Boston's waterfront. This highly animated site includes links to other related urban design projects and an online discussion of this rapidly growing area's future. The site also includes a number of animated maps and some intriguing historical accounts.

Transit Commuting to the South Boston Seaport
A student project from Spring, 1998 that dynamically represents the issues facing transit commuters who wish to the fastest growing part of Boston.This project involves a simple comparative analysis that looks at access to the area via two different transit modes. It is effectively illustrated with imaginative animations of maps and other representational aids.

Rapid Transit Trip Planning Application
A student project from Fall, 1996 that explores how to deliver travel-based information on Boston's subway and streetcar transit lines using a Java-based Applet.

Papers

The following are selected research papers that focus on the issue of employing emerging technologies to better inform public debate. By clicking on the titles, the abstracts are available.

Thesis (PhD)

Kawabata, Mizuki. "Job Accessibility and Employment Outcomes for Low-Silled Autoless Workers in U.S. metropolitan Areas". PhD 2002

Ferraz de Abreu, Pedro. "New Information Technologies in Public Participation: A Challenge to ld Decision-Making Institutional Frameworks". PhD 2002

Wu, Jingsong. "Wavelet-based Multiresolution Data Representations for Scalable Distributed GIS Services". PhD 2002

Srinivasan, Sumeeta. "Linking Land Use and Transportation: Measuring the Impact of Neighborhood-scale Spatial Patterns on Travel Behavior". PhD 2000

Rochon, Gilbert. "Scientific Visualization of Multi-Temporal Remotely-Sensed Data for Monitoring Drought-Related Famine Conditions: Nutritional, Socio-Economic, and Climatic Vulnerability in Sudan¡¯s Gezira". PhD 1999

Azad, Bijan. "Management of Enterprise-Wide GIS Implementation: Exploration of Five Case Studies". PhD 1999

Evans, John. "Infrastructures for Sharing Geographic Information Among Environmental Agencies". PhD 1997

Thesis (MCP)

Chang, Jeeseong. "Pedestrian Environment as an Urban Indicator: Developing a GIS Model for Measuring Pedestrian Friendliness". MCP 2003

Thundiyil, Karen. "Rising Temperatures and Expanding Megacities: Improving Air Quality in Mexico City through Urban Heat Island Mitigation". MCP 2003

Guo, Zhan. "Assessment of the Transfer Penalty for Transit Trips in Downtown Boston: A GIS-based Disaggregate Modeling Approach". MCP 2003

Goulding, Ken. "Digitally Augmented Sketch Planning". MCP 2002

Kumar, Chitra. "GIS Methods for Screening Potential Environmental Justice Areas in New England". MCP 2002

Gilat, Michael. "Coordinated Transportation and Land use Planning in the Developing World - The Case of Mexico City". MCP 2002

Humbads, Shailesh. "Suitability of Distributed Mobile Wireless networking for Urban Traffic Congestion Mitigation". MCP 2001

Lee, Waiduen. "Economic Impacts of the Urban Ring - A Spatial Analysis". MCP 2001

Kavanagh, Alex. "An Environmental Information System (EIS) for the City of Windhoek, Republic of Nambia". MCP 2001

Ferrand, Nicholas. "Emerging Visualization Technologies to Support Public Participation in the Urban Mass Transit Planning Context". MCP 1999

Ismail, Ayman. "A Distributed System Architecture for Spatial Data Management to Support Engineering Modeling". MCP 1999

Sakamoto, Hideo. "Socioeconomic Topography: Inner City Economic Development and Geographic Information Systems". MCP 1999

Schweibinz, Stephen. "Where Virtual Meets Reality: Empowering the Public with Tangible and Digital Vision Building Tools". MCP 1999

Zhang, Ming. "Job Accessibility in the San Juan Metropolitan Region (SJMR): Maximizing the Benefits of Tren Urbano". MCP 1999

Yeang, Chen-Hsiang. "Local Governments and Information Systems in Rural Thailand". MCP 1998

Tsui, Carleton. "Multimedia Data Integration and Retrieval and Planning Support Systems". MCP 1998

Allen, Michael. "The Spatial Demand for Office Space in Boston". MCP 1997

Alameh, Nadine. "Internet-Based Collaborative Geographic Information System". MCP 1997

Balsley, Erik. "The Use of Geographic Information Systems to Facilitate Brownfield Development". SB/MCP 1997

Baxmann, Matthias, "Spatial Consensus-building Through Access to Web-based GIS: An Online Planning tool For Leipzig". MCP 1997

Articles

Shiffer, M.J. (1995) "Environmental Review with Hypermedia Systems", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 22 (forthcoming, 1995).

Shiffer, M.J., (1994) "A Geographically-Based Multimedia Approach to City Planning", in Plaisant, C. (ed.), Human Factors in Computing Systems, (New York: Association for Computing Machinery), pp.265-266.

Shiffer, M.J. (1994) "Interactive Multimedia Planning Support: Moving from Stand-Alone Systems to the World Wide Web", paper presented at the European Science Foundation Specialist Meeting on GIS and Multimedia (May, 1994).

Shiffer, M.J. (1992) "Towards a Collaborative Planning System", Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, volume 19. pp. 709-722.