Welcome to the Spatial Cognitive Engineering Lab at UCSB


The main research issues of the SpaCE Lab are in the area of cognitive engineering for spatio-temporal services, such as location-based services. The primary goal is personalization of services to overcome the discrepancies between cognitive user parameters and physical system parameters. The research group especially deals with the theoretical conception, implementation, and testing of new methods and technologies for space-time decision support. A main focus in the area of cognitive semantic interoperability addresses formal representation and mapping of space-time concepts to improve communication between systems and users for geospatial information services. The research group has an interdisciplinary orientation and applies methods from the geographic, cognitive, and computer sciences.

News and events :-

Edward Pultar, PhD

Edward successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The Role of Geography in Social Networks: CouchSurfing as a Case Study.” Congratulations, Edward!

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Grant McKenzie

The SpaCE Lab is happy to announce a new member of the SpaCE Lab, Grant McKenzie. Grant has a bachelor’s degree in Geography from University of British Columbia, an Advanced Diploma in Geographic Information Systems from the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and a Masters of Applied Science in GIS from the University of Melbourne. He will be pursuing a PhD in the Geography at UCSB. Prior to starting at UCSB Grant also worked as a geospatial technology consultant and software developer. His research interests include Spatial Cognition and Navigation and Wayfinding.

Carsten Keßler PhD thesis

Carsten successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Context-Aware Semantics-Based Information Retrieval“. Congratulations Carsten!

SpaCE lab at GIScience

The SpaCE lab will be well represented at this years GIScience 2010 conference in Zurich:

  • “On Correlation Between Mobile Phone Usage and Travel Behavior A Case Study of Harbin, China” Yihong Yuan and Martin Raubal
  • “A General Framework for Conflation”, Benjamin Adams, Linna Li, Martin Raubal, and Michael Goodchild
  • “Location-based Social Network Capital”, Edward Pultar, Stephan Winter, and Martin Raubal
  • “Semantic Referencing – Determining Context Weights for Similarity Measurement”, Krzystof Janowicz, Benjamin Adams, and Martin Raubal

Edward will also be presenting at the GI Science Doctoral Colloquium co-located with GIScience 2010: “The Synergy of Social, Transportation, Communication, and Data Networks”

GIScience paper

“Semantic Referencing – Determining Context Weights for Similarity Measurement” by K. Janowicz, B. Adams, and M. Raubal was accepted as a full paper for GIScience 2010.

Christoph Wosniok thesis

Christoph Wosniok successfully finished his diploma thesis entitled “A Context-Aware Surf Spot Search Engine Based on Conceptual Spaces”  Congratulations, Christoph!

Environment Modeling: Using Space Syntax in Spatial Cognition Research

Workshop + Tutorial at Spatial Cognition 2010

15 August, 2010 – Mt. Hood, Oregon

Spatial cognition researchers have exacting methods for studying how people navigate, learn, and remember buildings, cities, and other large environments. Architects and planners have similarly careful computational methods for modeling the physical form of these environments. With this combination tutorial and workshop, we hope to further the pairing of behavioral methods and environmental models in spatial cognition research. The morning tutorial session will include a hands-on lesson in using environmental modeling techniques known as space syntax. No prior experience is necessary for the tutorial.

For the afternoon workshop session, researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers (short or long format) and posters (with an abstract) for presentation. Those who wish to attend without presenting are invited to submit a position paper. More…

Mike McDaniel Thesis

Mike McDaniel successfully finished his Master’s thesis entitled “Agent-Based Modeling of Lost Person Wayfinding.”  Congratulations, Mike!  You can see a video of sample runs of his NetLogo model here.

SpaCE Lab Retreat

We ended 2009 with a fun and productive research retreat in Santa Cruz, CA.

spacelabretreat group