Inside The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

It's May, which means that our students are shifting their attention from coursework to dissertations: they have now been matched with their supervisors and are preparing to get to work on their research. In addition to staff- and student-initiated topics, we have projects involving partners such as the British Red Cross, Transport for London, the Department for Transport, Westminster City Council and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, as well as firms such as Locomizer and OpenLocal. 

April also feels like a big change because, all of a sudden, the weather here has changed as well: it's felt like a long, wet and cold winter but now the sun is out and it is glorious. All of London seems to be going green almost overnight. People are out and about, and the bike ride to and from our lab(s) on Tottenham Court Road and in One Pool Street at UCL East in the Olympic Park is pleasant again. London is one of the greenest big cities in the world, with many large, famous parks now full of picnickers, people playing games and working out, and generally enjoying life.

What i'm excited about

Now that teaching is done for the year, we've got the space in the timetable to plan for fun things involving our students and alums. Last year's students will be attending their graduation ceremony at Royal Festival Hall on the 14th and we're having an evening social afterwards to find out what everyone is up to! However, some of our students 'never left' and two — one of them a Commonwealth Scholarship student from India — have been working for us as Research Associates on funded research projects ever since they submitted their dissertations. This year's students have a BBQ in UCL's 'Japanese Garden' to celebrate their achievements over the year, and we're also planning on a post-submission party at the end of August.

But first they have to write their theses! 

One of my dissertation students will be working on 'necrogeographies' — cemeteries and crematoria, in short — and how they serve multiple functions in urban contexts. In a sense, they experience similar challenges to neighbourhoods of the living: they can be over-crowded and under redevelopment pressure, they may be the only accessible green space in some neighbourhoods, and they can also function as ecological corridors for wildlife and help to moderate the urban heat island effect. So her research will involve a mix of spatial analysis, network analysis, and interviews! This topic wasn't something I'd ever thought about before, but I loved the 'lateral thinking' about urban space and analytics, and her obvious excitement about the project was contagious. Now I can't wait to see what she does! 

Another student is working with a recently digitised archive of 18th and 19th century newspapers: she will be looking at how they can become data for spatial analysis; specifically, whether the advertising and articles mention places that can be associated with particular sectors in order to build an economic geography of Britain after the First Industrial Revolution. This is much more speculative work, so I'll be helping her with tools, techniques, and thinking about how to present the results. I have no idea what she will find! 

My third student is working with a large internet provider on a project sourced through UCL's Consumer Data Research Centre: she'll be working with sensitive internal data from the telco to try to predict installation challenges based on demographics, housing type, and other factors. Installation issues cost the company huge amounts of money because it can mean their estimates of the engineer time needed to connect up new customers is wildly wrong and they end up missing other appointments and losing potential customers. There's a lot of really cool spatial analysis to be done here, because geography and network topology are clearly going to be a big part of it, but controlling for that alongside everything else that is installation-specific is not trivial. 

What I'm working on

As Head of Department, much of my life is taken up with email and meetings — which I'll spare you here — but I've just submitted a co-authored review for Nature Cities with colleagues at Bristol, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Buffalo on the value of text and text-mining in urban analytics thanks to recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models. This is an area of particular interest to me as I've been amazed at what is now possible using even basic techniques that run on a laptop! I'm also hoping to write up my work on open teaching using open source software for the Journal of Open Source Education.

I'm also starting to look ahead to the coming academic year — your year! — to check that our modules and assessments are aligned, and that there aren't crunch points where everything will seem like it's due the same day. You're coming to us with a wide range of backgrounds — in the applications I've seen everything from architecture to engineering — and skills, and we want to do our best to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to excel if you're willing to work hard (and, ideally, work smart too!). I've got a lot of tweaks that I want to make to my own Foundations of Spatial Data Science module for next year based on student feedback and notes that I took during the term. I also need to check that the advice and self-test lessons on Code Camp for students who have never coded before is up-to-date.

Finally, I also have a post-doctoral researcher starting work in May to build on and around work that started while I was a lecturer at King's College London with Phil Hubbard and Loretta Lees. That includes a publication with a previous MSc student from Singapore in the prestigious journal Environment & Planning A. She will be enhancing the address matching algorithm that I developed in order to make it more scalable and able to run on a distributed computing system so that we can support qualitative researchers on a large piece of funded social science to target surveys and interviews. 

Inside The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis is a new feature that will be regularly updated throughout the academic year.