Overview | Research | Teaching | Facilities | People
Overview | Research | Teaching | Facilities | People
This page describes the status of Geographic Information Science (GIS) at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology and provides the information needed for the five-year review of MIT's membership in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). Following a brief overview of GIS at MIT, the last four sections of this page describe GIS research and related activities; teaching and curricula; facilities and resources; and researchers and staff.
Researchers at MIT have long been involved in the development and use of computational methods and tools for representing, manipulating, modeling, and visualizing the location and interaction of (geo)spatial objects and fields. However, without a formal Geography department or program at the Institute, this work with GIS tools and models has evolved in an ad hoc fashion with limited development of a common cross-department infrastructure and little interdepartmental research on the theories and methods underlying the evolving GIS technologies. In many ways, this structure has been helpful. The technologies that have helped advance our understanding of geographic processes and spatial relationships have come from a broad range of disciplines. MIT has had sufficient disciplinary breadth to its technological expertise that it could tap a rich assortment of emerging technologies and computational methods in innovative ways without much need for a shared infrastructure. More recently, however, the volume of geospatially referenced data and sophisticated geoprocessing tools has grown so rapidly that more cross-fertilization of ideas and interoperable technologies is especially important. Providing these connections while retaining the breadth and innovation of a multidiciplinary approach is our current endeavor and it benefits from increased internal coordination and collaboration as well as membership in cross-university consortia such as UCGIS.
Currently, there are no degree programs at MIT focused specifically on GIS. However, a number of MIT departmental programs and research labs have significant research and teaching interests that emphasize geospatial analysis and the development and use of GIS technologies. This website focuses on the more extensive efforts without trying to list all the more general IT-related efforts that are clearly relevant (e.g., user interface work at the Media Lab, internet protocol work at the W3C consortium, and computer graphics and distributed computing work at the Lab for Computer Science).
Recent decisions have enhanced the Institute-wide scope and coordination of GIS and GIScience efforts. In 1999, the Provost approved hiring a GIS and spatial data specialist to support interdepartmental activities and increased sharing of our geoprocessing infrastructure. In summer 2001, the Libraries hired a full time GIS and Statistics Specialist. There are also close professional ties between the GIS staff at MIT, Harvard University, and Tufts University. All three schools are engaged in expanding their GIS resources on campus and are sharing experiences.
Several MIT departments and labs are actively engaged in research involving
topics on the UCGIS research
agenda. Relevant projects range from interoperable geoprocessing
services and geographic representation methods to community empowerment
experiments and spatially disaggregated engineering models. Brief
descriptions of several such projects are included in the following table.
Innovative applications of GIS technology are also evident in a diverse
set of research projects spread across a number of other departments including
Economics, Political Science, History, Ocean Engineering, and the Sloan
School of Management.
Academic Departments with significant GIS-related research projects
| Distributed, Interoperable Geoprocessing | The Planning Support Systems Group (PSS) of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning is participating in the Open GIS Consortium's Web Mapping Testbeds (I & II) to develop standard APIs for distributed and interoperable geoprocessing services; |
| MITOrthoTools | Example of PSS work on distributed and interoperable geoprocessing services. These web server tools facilitate networked access to digital orthophotos by mosaicing customized snippets of digital orthophotos on-the-fly in response to WMT-compliant 'get_map' requests. |
| Spatial Data Infrastructure | Providing a public data infrastructure with sufficiently rich and standard protocols for cataloguing, querying, and retrieving key types of spatially referenced data. Grants from Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) have supported PSS development of a 'clearinghouse node' for Boston metro orthos.. Grants from several other agencies have supported MITOrthoServers for image collections in other US cities and states. |
| Urban 'Respiration' | Understanding how cities 'breathe' in order to improve air quality management. Developing improved techniques and linkages for integrating land use planning, environmental monitoring (via mobile trace gas measurement), and air pollution modeling. Collaborative project involving Chemical Engineering and Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, Aeodyne Research, Inc, University of New Hampshire, and University of Washington. |
| Modeling Urban Spatial Structure | Understanding the effects of neighborhood- and parcel-scale land use
on travel behavior (viz, transportation demand, trip chaining, and the
like).
Involves image processing algorithms, factor analysis, and travel behavior surveys. Collaborative project involving Urban Studies and Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering. |
| Luminous Table Project | Improved user interfaces for urban design through the use of computer projection, computer modeling, and realtime sensors.. E.g., when users move buildings on the table, the sensors detect the motion, trigger the rerunning of sunlighting or traffic models, and project the model results back onto the table. Collaborative project involving Urban Studies and Planning and the Tangible Media Group of the Media Labs. |
| City Scanning Project | Automated production of georeferenced three dimensional data from digitized photographs. Example of computational geometry projects in the Lab for Computer Science and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
| Wavelet Compression | Recent work in the IT group of Civil and Environmental Engineering has developed wavelet compression methods for handling irregular meshes such as TINs. |
| Camfield Estates Project | This experiment in community building and empowerment provides networked home computing and training to several hundred residents of a low-income urban development. Collaborative project between the Media Lab and Urban Studies and Planning. |
MIT does not offer a specific certificate or degree in GIS or GIScience. Rather, the focus is on enabling students in several disciplines and professional programs to become sufficiently knowledgable and skilled with GIS concepts and technologies that, within their domain, they can apply them well and they can push the envelope on geoprocessing methods that utilize next-generation GIS technologies. GIS classes are offered at MIT in a variety of forms that range from short, non-credit modules and lab exercises on GIS techniques to full-semester, for-credit classes that focus on underlying theory and methods. Examples of short, non-credit GIS workshops offered by Information Systems (IS) during this year's January Independent Activities Period include:
Here are examples of for-credit classes that focus on GIS methods
and technologies, on underlying computer science principles and methods,
and/or on using GIS technologies for application-specific modeling, visualization,
and analysis.
Course 1, Civil and Environmental Engineering
MIT has a comprehensive university site license for all ESRI GIS products. These are available through Athena, MIT's UNIX-based campus-wide academic computing facility, as well as on private UNIX workstations and Window machines throughout campus. We also have an Oracle site license which includes a number of Oracle Spatial licenses and a broad range of application software and facilities for image processing, video editing, graphic animation, spatial statistics, and the like. In addition, individual departments and research labs have additional licenses for other GIS and DBMS software from such vendors as Intergraph, MapInfo, Caliper, and MicroSoft.
There are over 500 Athena workstations available to students in public clusters and all can run various ESRI and Oracle software for GIS and DBMS. Individual departments, research groups, and labs maintain private Athena and other Unix workstations, NT clusters and printers.
Academic Computing / Information Systems manages four electronic classrooms which are available for use by MIT courses. Each classroom is networked and has a number of individual workstations, one of which is connected to a projection facility. One of the rooms has 23 high end networked Windows machines with double heads and two processors. The other classrooms run Athena (UNIX) workstations. Two classrooms have both color (11x17) and black and white printers. Many departments and labs, and some libraries, have additional peripheral equipment and workstations (such as film recorders, slide scanners, large-format plotters, etc.) that support teaching and research within their own department.
MIT is currently creating a spatial data service which will be operated by Information System (IS) and the MIT Libraries. The service includes training and consulting offered by IS and Libraries staff. The heart of the service will be a spatial data library. The data will be available through the MIT LAN and by off campus users with certificates. The data library will be based on Oracle Spatial and will be accessed over the web using SQL/Java and ArcIMS.
MIT's delegates to the UCGIS
Faculty who use GIS in their research and/or teaching include:Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Information Systems
MIT LibrariesFor comments, questions, or information please contact
MIT UCGIS Webmaster Daniel Sheehan.