2008 Summer Workshop:
Spatial Filtering

Workshop flier: Please distribute the 2008 WorkshopFlier.pdf to interested parties.

Location: The University of Texas at Dallas

Dates: Monday, June 16, to Friday, June 20, 2008

Participant's Support:                                                                                          

•  Tuition and registration fees are waived for this workshop.

•  Admitted applicants and successful participants will receive, funded under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, up to $750 at the end of the workshop as support for their expenses for attending the workshop.

•  Depending on available funds and special circumstances, student applicants individually may  apply  for a modest increase of support.
   

Synopsis                                                                                                                

The workshop introduces a group of emanating academics and established professionals, who are engaged in spatial analysis, demography, epidemiology, ecology or econometrics, to the novel methodology of spatial filtering. Non-parametric spatial filtering and semi-parametric spatial filtering belong to a developing family of techniques that is geared toward analyzing geo-referenced dataset in an exploratory and confirmatory framework. The dissemination of this newer methodology via the summer workshop is important for several reasons: [1] the conceptional simplicity of spatial filtering makes spatial statistics more accessible to a very wide user group, one that is familiar with conventional statistics but not necessarily with spatial statistics; [2] the increasing appearance of spatial filtering approaches in methodological and applied literatures from a broad disciplinary scope indexes both its growing popularity and a need for more researchers to be trained in its uses; [3] spatial filtering dramatically simplifies the implementation of linear, nonlinear, generalized linear as well as mixed models for spatially autocorrelated data; [4] in order to evaluate and critique the spatial filtering approaches, the workshop will juxtapose them with established modes of analyzing spatial data; and, finally, [5] the workshop participants will be introduced to software tools that prototype spatial filtering algorithms within the widely available R computing-platform. The workshop is designed to allow participants to practice their acquired skills on a wide range of provided or personally owned geo-referenced datasets. The participants will be trained during the workshop to become--based on their specific backgrounds--well versed users, informed instructors, or potential developers of the emerging spatial filtering methodology. With the rapidly increasing volume of geo-referenced data and the constitution of geographic information systems to support virtually every facet of our daily lives, skills to analyze geo-referenced data in an informed manner are becoming increasingly relevant. This workshop contributes toward providing academic and professional specialist these analytical skills.