Collins Conference Room
Seminar
  US Mountain Time

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

Devin White (Research Associate, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center; Photogrammetric Scientist, Integrity Applications Incorporated)

Abstract.  Understanding how individuals can move through a landscape, and what routes they are most likely to take, is a challenging problem when you do not know where their travels begin or end.  Established pathfinding techniques in Geographic Information Science operate on the assumption that the origin or destination is known (preferably both, if possible), so they are of limited utility when you are trying to get a more general impression of potential patterns of movement or investigate the placement of distributed fixed points like settlements.  This presentation will highlight research that couples human biodynamics with remotely sensed data and a novel massively parallelized pathfinding approach to create a pedestrian travel probability surface for an entire landscape that can be used to explore the above topics.  It will also discuss how the research can be applied to calibrating and driving geospatially-enabled agent-based models as well as reconstructing or uncovering patterns of life in past and present cities.  Specific examples of its successful application within the field of archaeology will be showcased.

Bio Devin received his MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he focused on the application of spaceborne remote sensing, geographic information science, and biodynamics-based predictive modeling of human movement to explore patterns of long-distance trade and migration in the Western Papaguería portion of the prehistoric North American Southwest.  He is currently a Research Associate at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and a Photogrammetric Scientist at Integrity Applications Incorporated. In the former role, he is expanding the scope and sophistication of his dissertation research, including an emphasis on the use of high performance computing to enable the analysis of very large landscapes.  In the latter role, he is a subject matter expert in the areas of quantitative social science, modeling complex adaptive systems, social network analysis, high performance computing, tactical airborne and spaceborne geopositioning, uncertainty propagation and analysis, geospatial data standards, image science, computer vision, multimodal data and image registration, data fusion, data visualization, imaging spectroscopy, LIDAR, SAR, and handheld geospatial applications. His most recent publication is an edited volume entitled Least Cost Analysis of Social Landscapes: Archaeological Case Studies (University of Utah Press, 2012).

Purpose: 
Research Collaboration
SFI Host: 
Scott Ortman