A Guide to Geographic Information Systems and Mapping for Non-GIS Professionals

“GIS - short for Geographic Information Systems, can be a difficult topic to understand for many people. Though GIS is a complex system, the benefits and uses of GIS are readily applicable to the masses. This article tries to explain the basics of GIS, its nuances, benefits and practical uses for everyone.”

What is GIS?

Think of maps on computer. That's a very simple way to start understanding GIS.

Let's break down the term Geographic Information Systems, to understand each part:

· Geographic = a location. For example - your house, a city, a highway connecting two cities

· Information = information about the location. For example - how many people in the house, name of the city, lanes in the a highway

· System = that ties-in the above two

GIS is a unique because

· It combines location and information about the location. Using GIS, you can not only see the 'place' but find out more information about the place. Putting this concept in a system - typically a computer software - gives the ability to analyze this information in a powerful way.

· It gives the ability to see and analyze many 'layers' of information at once. Many types of data, can be layered and analyzed together.

For example, to find a suitable site for a new business in a city, one would need these different layers: land parcels, roads, population, household income, etc.

Some common GIS terminology

Before we drive-in, there are a few terms which you may not be familiar with:

· Spatial : relating to 'space' or 'location'

· Geospatial: Relating to location on earth, commonly used term to describe many GIS data and analysis

· GPS: Global Positioning System, a satellite based system that gives accurate location information anywhere on earth.

How does GIS work?

The GIS workflow consists of following steps:

· Data Collection: To build any GIS, we need data. The data is collected, converted to a convenient format and stored for use in subsequent processes.

Example: If you are building a GIS Emergency Response, one needs data on road networks in the city, location of hospitals/fire stations/police stations, addresses of residents etc. Various tools such as GPS devices, Aerial photos, Survey equipment etc. can be used for data collection

· Display and Analysis: The stored data is displayed and analyzed as per requirement. The data is displayed on a computer screen and the operator gives commands to perform analysis.

Example: To find the shortest route from a house to the nearest hospital, the operator analyzes using a route finding algorithm on the roads data and the resulting path is displayed on the computer screen. Many different types of data is displayed as different layers and they are analyzed together.

· Sharing: The result of analysis needs to be shared with the decision maker for further action.

Example: In emergency response, the shortest route found using analysis, can be shared with the ambulance driver in form of printed or verbal instruction.

GIS Data

Majority time and effort in GIS is spent on collecting, formatting and storing the source data. So it is important to understand the nature of the GIS data and collection methods.

Two broad categories of GIS data are:

· Vector: In a GIS, real-world objects are represented using either points, lines or polygons.

For example, a city government may store the location of garbage collection sites as points, roads as lines and property boundaries as polygons.

· Raster: Raster data can be thought of as a photograph. Commonly used raster data is aerial photos, satellite images, scanned maps and digital elevation models. These 'pictures' can be called a GIS data source when they contain information about the location - which part of the real-world do they represent. Hence, the raster data formats allow for storing real world coordinates of each pixel in the data.

All GIS data, contains two-types of information - location and information about the location. So vector data will have coordinates (location) and attributes (information about the location).

Applications of GIS

· Emergency Response: GIS helps locate where help is needed and finding the shortest route for the responders to get there

· Utility: Power, Telecom, Oil and Gas companies use GIS to map and manage their networks.

· Urban Planning: Planners use GIS to monitor city growth and identify areas future development

· Insurance services: Insurance companies can process claims much faster and accurately, if they have access to mapping data and geographical information. Buyers benefits from reduced premiums and faster settlements

· Wildlife management: GPS tracking of animals to study their habitat and migration patterns. GIS helps identify in wildlife conservation and optimal use of resources

· Healthcare: Using GIS one can identify a possible epidemic outbreak and take preventive measures. Officials use GIS for planning healthcare facilities that are accessible to more citizens.

· Marketing: Helps business sell and direct their products to the right market using GIS datasets and analysis tools

· Disaster relief: Remote Sensing, GIS and field GPS units can help locate victims and speed rescue efforts

· Tourism: First thing you do when travelling to a new place is to buy a map, right? By using GIS and web-mapping services, tourism authorities, travel agents, hoteliers and others can provide accurate and relevant information to travelers

· Finding local information: people can search for local information, places to eat, shop and visit. A GIS database enables searches like 'restaurant within 2 kms from here'

· Getting directions: Almost everyone in the western world would have used a direction finding service. To find turn-by-turn directions to any place. These online mapping services are powered by GIS technology.

· E-Governance: Land Information Systems, uses GIS to create and manage digital land records. Governments all over the world use it to manage the land parcel database. Citizens benefit by getting accurate, timely and easy access to property information.

· Military/Defense: Remote sensing techniques have been used for decades for surveillance and reconnaissance.

· Agriculture: Surveying soil conditions, analyzing crop patterns and using GPS-enabled field instruments to better manage agriculture produce

· Real Estate: Developers benefit from getting quantitative information on market needs and existing infrastructure. Agents use mapping services to help clients find the right property by applying location constraints ( near to school, within 15 minutes drive work etc )

· Transport / Delivery services: Using live GPS tracking and GIS tools, companies can manage their fleet efficiently.

· Art: Artists can effectively combine spatial information and power of mapping to express emotions.

· Archaeology: Using spatial analysis techniques and visual interpretation of aerial imagery, archaeologists can discover potential sites, and manage the excavations.

· Power: Electricity companies use GIS extensively in planning and managing their assets, laying networks and monitoring usage

· Hydrological Modeling: GIS adds spatial dimension to hydrological modeling and helps predict water levels in rivers/lakes, rain water runoff, ground water availability and better manage water levels.

· .... and many more

Example: A point data for a garbage collection site will have Coordinates - latitude and longitude of earth Attributes - zip code, pickup time etc.

Tips for Authoring Grant Proposals

Tips for Authoring Grant Proposals

Writing grant proposals is hard. They are harder than papers because they are part creative writing. Creative writing tends to come unnaturally to scientists and engineers who may be more comfortable dealing with known facts. Ph.D. students encounter a similar challenge when proposing their Ph.D. work. Below present:

• A checklist of questions good research proposals tend to answer and
• A generic 1+15-page grant outline.

Both are based on over twenty years of writing and evaluating grant proposals. They offer a starting point for developing your thoughts. Most successful grant proposals do not answer the questions explicitly, but rather weave a convincing story.

Take-away point: Focus first on the problem you seek to solve and why it is interesting. Only when properly prepared, will readers and evaluators be motivated to care about your potential solutions?

Seven Criteria

• CARE: Are you tackling an important problem? If you can make progress on it, will anyone care?
• NOW: Why now? If this problem is so important, why has it not been addressed before?
• IDEAS: Do you have concrete ideas for starting an attack on the problem and a vision for proceeding further? Is initial progress likely and subsequent progress possible?
• RESULTS: Do you have some preliminary results? Do you demonstrate a good understanding of the problem and the methods needed attack it further?
• PLAN: Do you have sensible plans and methods (e.g., concrete steps and ways of decoupling risks)?
• CAN-DO: Why you? Why are your qualifications and infrastructure appropriate?
• LEGAL: Have you followed the rules of the solicitation (e.g., compelling broader impacts for NSF)?

Find the above criteria valuable for both writing and evaluating grant proposals.

Generic Outline

Most NSF grants ask for the research to be described in a 1-page summary, followed by a 15-page description, not counting references. A rough outline is as follows, but feels free to expand and contract sections to fit your circumstances.

• Summary (1 page): A one-page abstract that touches on all seven criteria.
• Introduction (2 pages): Discuss the problem, addressing criteria CARE and NOW and forecasting answers to other criteria.
• Preliminary Work (3 pages): Show some progress on understanding and addressing the problem, e.g., half of a good paper, to address the criterion RESULTS.
• Research Directions (4 pages): Show vision with concrete steps for middles parts of the grant (after the preliminary work) and promising directions for the later years, addressing criterion IDEAS.
• Research Methods/Plan (2 pages): Show you know what methods you need, steps you may follow, and why you can do it, addressing criteria PLAN and CAN-DO.
• Related Work (2 pages): Discuss the related work of others if this is not already integrated in other sections.
• Own Prior Work (1 page): Discuss your prior work, addressing the criterion CAN-DO.
• Broader/Educational Impacts (1 page): Discuss broader and education impacts, etc., addressing the criterion LEGAL. Read and consider citing articles on these matters.
• Conclusion (0 pages): Finish with a short, one-paragraph conclusion, as this is too late to say something important.
• References (extra pages): Show that you are familiar with the state-of-the-art, addressing the criterion CAN-DO.

Especially when authoring your first grant proposals, ask colleagues to privately share with you examples of successful proposals. Read and initially emulate their successful style; later develop your own approach. Also, liberally use figures, diagrams, and graphs to promote understanding even from those who only skim your proposal.

How to Find Research Problems

Computer science includes many different kinds of research efforts, some of which are more tyrannosaur cal than others. You can contribute to one of these efforts in various ways.

• About the smallest bone that you can find in Computer Science is a replication or implementation of someone else's work.

While this doesn't get you points for originality, it may be useful, both to your education and to the field. If you can make it useful to enough people (say, by making it portable and Web-available), it might even get your name known.

• A significant small bone to look for is a tweak that improves a well-known technique. (In many subfields, you will be expected to demonstrate objectively that your method is an improvement.) Much research is of this kind.

When reading papers, stay on the lookout for such bones. In particular, notice when the author may be making harmful simplifications or arbitrary choices in his/her approach. These are opportunities for you to try something different.

• Along the same lines, you might make a controlled comparison of two or more algorithms, evaluating them by some objective measure of efficiency or accuracy. Designing a clean comparison does take thought, and carrying it out is often a lot of work.

This is usually a medium-sized bone, depending on how much work it takes and (more important) how surprising the establishment finds your results. Note that quantitative studies of this sort are becoming increasingly important in some areas of CIS (e.g., operating systems, machine learning, natural language, algorithms).

• You can thoroughly review the existing research in some area. Note that this takes a good deal of time to do well, and is not likely to do much for your career unless a lot of people read and cite your lit review. (To publish you'd typically need to co-author with a famous advisor, or else find some decent journal that is willing to publish high-level overview articles by lowly grad students.)

On the upside, writing a lit review will make you something of an expert, able to talk confidently with other researchers in the area; it will give you an idea of the shortcomings of past research; and it may suffice for a WPE II, an M.S.E. thesis, or the first part of a Ph.D. thesis. You can make it available to others via your Web page or an online paper archive.

• Build a large program or device of some kind. This gets you some name recognition, since there aren't that many big systems out there, and it also confirms your ability as a software engineer. However, do consider carefully: Will this system be of direct use to anyone? If not, will it at least beat performance records? If again not, does it have other merits, such as demonstrating how to integrate or scale up existing techniques, or introducing a collection of new techniques or a new perspective?

If you are only one of many participants in a lab project, be sure that you make a ``separable contribution'' -- some piece of the work that is impressive, that stands alone, and that people will associate you with.

• Your field identifies various problems or issues as significant. These often represent big bones in the skeleton of the field -- problems that arise often, and whose solution makes a difference. Get to know some of these problems and the work that's been done on them. If you see how to achieve the first-ever solution, or a better solution, or a different style of solution, that's a big deal. Sometimes finding a good solution involves changing the problem slightly.
• If you are feeling ambitious and have a big-bone temperament, study important papers in your branch of computer science, flip through some conference proceedings to see what people are working on, and ask: What problems (recognized or unrecognized) are obstructing progress in my field? Can I solve them? If not, can I at least formalize them? Can I prove to my colleagues that solving them would make a difference?
• Talk to your advisor about problems that are ripe for the plucking. Every field has its share of problems that everyone knows are important,'' and that may even get mentioned a lot, but on which no one has yet made a serious attempt. If you think you spot such a problem, use your colleagues and the library to make sure it hasn't been plucked yet.
• Finally, you can identify new interesting problems. This is often not as hard as it might sound:
• Study existing (applied) systems and note what they do badly at.
• If your field is interdisciplinary, ask people in the other discipline what they think is interesting. In fact, ask them why they think computer scientists are irrelevant.
• In many areas, the data have a way of suggesting their own problems. Linguists can find unexplained phenomena in any magazine article. Systems programmers can collect data on actual disk access patterns and study it for regularities to exploit. Theoreticians of programming languages can look at real programming languages, and graphics programmers can look at real photographs and movies, for effects that they don't know how to capture.

Keep in mind:

There's lots of research out there, so you have a choice about what to work on. (Even if your advisor is very hands-on, you still have some choice.) So, especially when you are considering a time-consuming project, keep your long-term goals in mind. Will it:

• educate you?
• lead to even better projects?
• be an enjoyable way to spend your time?
• serve a goal that will still seem worthy 6, 12, or 48 months from now?
• be likely to "succeed" in some sense?
• escape your advisor's imprecations?
• get the academic research community interested in you and your work?
• prove to an industrial employer that you have what they want?
• make you a so-called ``famous grad student''?

Finally:

Now that you're in grad school and no one sets your agenda, everything you do is open-ended. That means you can easily spend too much time on any task you start, especially if stubborn perfectionism or an inferiority complex leads you to feel that your work is never good enough, or if you're subconsciously trying to put off that scary next phase of your research.

• Don't spend eternity on background reading. Recognize that you will have to start your work in a state of partial ignorance: you don't have time to learn everything you need to know. That's okay -- your professors do the same thing. In fact it's good, since ignorance leaves your mind free to see new ways of doing things. So start doing your own thinking early. You can alternate that with reading: just show your ideas periodically to someone who can warn you about related work and point you to relevant papers.
• Don't spend eternity on one problem. No solution is ever complete. Take the time to make your work solid and beautiful and presentable, but recognize when you've hit a point of diminishing returns. Use project #1 to inspire project #2, which stands as research on its own. Don't use it as the core of project #1', #1'', etc. forever.

How to Improve English Communication Skills

Improving your English communicative ability is about first knowing your goals for learning English and then establishing clear steps for reaching your goals. Once you have done that, focus on fluency rather than accuracy; then work on skills that will help you conveys exactly what you mean to say.

Instructions

Non-Verbal Cues and Gestures

1. Get a good book on the gestures that native English speakers employ. This book should be written by an expert in your own language. From this you should gain an understanding of the cultural cues behind the gestures and the norms of their use.

2. Watch a 5-minute video of native speakers and take note of the gestures they use. This should be a dialogue. Do not worry about understanding everything they say; comprehension is not as important here as imitation.

3. Watch the video again in short 20- or 30-second increments, and try to repeat as closely as possible the same gestures and intonation. Repeat until you are confident of your performance. If possible, record yourself performing the dialogue. Compare your performance to the original and identify your weak points.

4. Become confident in using your hands when speaking. You will be amazed at how much you can communicate with your hands. Note that native speakers use such hand gestures in coordination with verbal communication to more clearly convey ideas.

5. Speak with confidence. Remember: native English speakers make mistakes, too. One of the key differences between native and non-native speakers is how they deal with mistakes.

Clarification Strategies

1. If you make a mistake when speaking, DON'T WORRY. Watch the facial cues of your conversation partner to see if they understood what you intended to say. If you are unsure that your meaning has been clearly conveyed, ask a question such as "Did that make sense?" or "Am I being clear?" This is an example of a clarification strategy.

2. Study synonyms and antonyms, and practice explaining complicated ideas in simpler words. The key to improving your communicative competency is being understood, in any way possible---it is not to appear "perfect" (in fact, there is no such thing as a perfect English speaker).

3. Find a conversation partner---someone who will speak English with you for about an hour or two a week. Improving communicative ability will take time. Have patience. Reward yourself frequently for the small gains you make. Be sure to speak only English with your conversation partner.

Intonation and Pronunciation

1. Find some English songs you like and learn to sing them.

2. Observe the mouth movements of native speakers. Again, a good video will be invaluable here.

3. Buy some audio books. Listen and repeat some parts, even if you don't understand everything. You can do this when doing housework, for example.

4. Read aloud in English for 15 to 20 minutes every day, paying special attention to "-s" and "-ed" word endings. This will strengthen your mouth and tongue muscles and accustom your mouth to English pronunciation.

Developing an "English Ear"

1. Do some intense listening practice for 5 to 10 minutes every day. This means focusing intently on a news program, a podcast or an audio book that you find interesting.

2. Do some passive listening for 20 to 30 minutes every day. This means just hearing English in the background while you are doing some other activities. This will acclimate your ear to the rhythm and cadence of English.

3. Choose a word or two and repeat them to yourself throughout the day. Don't do this in front of other people, though!

Vocabulary

1. Identify words that are frequently used in subjects that interest you.

2. Choose five of these words every day. Before going to bed, write the words three times on a piece of paper, and then say each word aloud to yourself three times. Finally, reread the three words and silently repeat them in your head.

3. Study the same five words when you wake up in the morning, using the same pattern as described in the previous step.

4. Carry a few flash cards with you throughout the day. During a free moment, quiz yourself with the flashcards or simply review them. Research has shown that a student must use a new word about 15 times before being able to remember it consistently.

5. Record you saying your target words and their definitions. Carry this recording with you and listen to it at various times during the day, preferably when you are doing something that does not require much attention, e.g., during your commute, when doing housework, while exercising.