The Geo-Social Lab is home to research projects aimed at analyzing and understanding massive and complex geo-social networks and processes that drive our economy, society, and the environment.
We develop innovative computational algorithms and geovisualization techniques to help address real-world problems in diverse areas such as human mobility and migration, demography, kinship networks, public health, hazards and social vulnerability, and sustainability.
New paper: Koylu, C., Kasakoff, A.B., & Torkashvand, M. (2025). US migration from 1850 to 1920: A comparison of family trees with linked census data PDF https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2025.2516022
We are excited to announce the launch of theCancer Analytics & Maps for Small Areas (CAMSA) in Iowa Cancer Registry.
Funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), CAMSA is an interactive mapping tool to visualize cancer data at the ZIP code and county levels based on user-centered design.
New collaborative paper: Rethinking GIScience Education in an Age of Disruptions https://doi.org/10.1111/tgis.70048
New paper: Koylu, C., & Kasakoff, A. B. (2025). Ethical Challenges in Analyzing and Mapping Historical Demographic Changes and Migration Using Population-Scale Family Trees PDF https://doi.org/10.14714/CP105.1945
Caglar presented a paper at SSHA 2024 in Toronto, CA: Proximity of Parents to Their Adult Children in the United States in 1880: Evidence from Family Trees
Loretta presented Roots & Migrants: A user-centered story map application for understanding and teaching historical population dynamics and migration in the U.S. at NACIS 2024 in Tacoma, WA.
New collaborative paper: A research agenda for GIScience in a time of disruptions
Dr. Kwon started as an Assistant Professor of Geospatial Science at Lehman College!
As part of the NSF-funded BluGAP project, Maryam developed the “Rivers and Risks” interactive story map to bridge the gap between spatial analysts and watershed communities and foster collaboration in river protection.
Ariana Luan, Devesh Aggarwal, and Sumin Bae, our high school researchers, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
On June 26, 2024, The Geo-Social Lab hosted the first NSF-sponsored workshop connecting high school teachers and students for the development of "Roots & Migrants", an online educational tool for enhancing public scientific literacy on U.S. history, migration, and kinship networks.
CaGIS+UCGIS Symposium at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Caglar participated on a panel about the curriculum needs that can respond to and shape the direction of GIScience in an age of scientific disruption.
Maryam won the best student paper award with her paper on 'A Hierarchical Approach for Geocoding Birthplaces in Temporally Continuous Crowd-Sourced Family Tree Data'.
Jinyi presented our research on 'Social Vulnerability and Exposure to Private Well Nitrate Contamination in Iowa: An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach'.
Caglar presented our paper on Analysis of U.S. Internal Migration Using Population-Scale Family Tree Data, 1850–1920 at PAA 2024, April 18, Columbus, OH.
New article by Caglar and Alice: Population-scale kinship networks PDF https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg2193
New paper: Andris, C., Koylu, C. & Porter, M.A. (2023). Human-network regions as effective geographic units for disease mitigation PDF https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00426-1
New paper: Kwon, H., Koylu, C. Revealing associations between spatial time series trends of COVID-19 incidence and human mobility: an analysis of bidirectionality and spatiotemporal heterogeneity PDF https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-023-00357-0
Maryam and Caglar presented papers at SSHA 2023:
Linking family trees with the 1880 U.S. Census Records
Jinyi presented her research on the Curriculum Design of Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability in Secondary School at the I-GUIDE Forum 2023, October 4, 2023, New York, NY. Read the conference proceeding
Hoeyun published the first paper of her dissertation, "Natural language processing meets spatial time series analysis and geovisualization: Identifying and visualizing spatio-topical sentiment trends on Twitter", in Cartography and Geographic Information Science.Preprint available
Caglar presented FlowMapper.org: Flow Mapping Made Easy! at NACIS 2023 Practical Cartography Day in Pittsburgh, PA. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Caglar gave a seminar “Giant Family Trees in Human Geography: Preliminary Results from US 1789 to 1930”, at University College London, UK.
Caglar presented the paper co-authored with Maryam "The effect of disruptive events on spatial and social interactions: An assessment of structural changes in pre-and post-COVID-19 pandemic networks” at the GIScience 2023 Workshop on Disruptive Movement Analysis (DMA’23), Leeds, UK.
Kelvin Liu and Kevin (Rongxuan) Zhu, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Kelvin's research poster!
Click for Kevin's research poster!
Hoeyun succesfully defended her Ph.D. on May 8, 2023, and is now a Ph.D! Congrats Dr. Kwon! Dr. Kwon will continue her journey as a postdoc in University of Colorado Boulder! Learn more about Hoeyun!
Caglar was elected as the Vice President of Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Read More
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the unequal impact of COVID-19 by analyzing the mobility behaviors of socially vulnerable populations at the AutoCarto 2022 conference held at Redlands, CA. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Maryam presented our research on mapping migration regions and their evolution from population-scale family trees at The 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities (GeoHumanities’22), November 1, 2022, Seattle, WA. Read the conference proceeding
Caglar presented FlowMapper at NACIS 2022 in Minneapolis. Watch the presentation on YouTube
Caglar participated on a panel about multigenerational households on ABC/Channel 9 on "Ethical Perspectives On the News" moderated by Leon Tabak. Watch the panel on YouTube!
Super excited to announce NSF funding ($477,734) of our project on population-scale kinship networks and migration! Public abstract
Welcome to Fall 2022 and our new Ph.D. Student, Maryam Torkashvand!
Adelina Chau and Jonathan Fan, our high school interns, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Adelina's research poster!
Click for Jonathan's research poster!
Very excited to collaborate with Jacob Oleson (Biostatistics) on National Cancer Institute (NCI) funded project ($1,188,804), "Development of Small Area Interactive Risk Maps for Cancer Control Efforts". Public abstract
Hoeyun Kwon won the prestigious Doctoral Scholarship Award of 2022 by the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)! Congrats Hoeyun!
Hoeyun Kwon won the second place in GIS Specialty Group Student Honors Paper Competition at AAG 2022! Congrats Hoeyun!
Our papers "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" and "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" have been published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science and Journal of Maps!
Congrats for Hoeyun Kwon for successfully defending her dissertation proposal and becoming a Ph.D. candidate!
Our paper "Measuring and mapping long-term changes in migration flows using population-scale family tree data" has been accepted for publication in Cartography and Geographic Information Science!Preprint available
Our paper "FlowMapper.org: A web-based framework for designing origin-destination flow maps" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Maps! Check Flowmapper! Check out the preprint!
Hoeyun Kwon presented our research on the relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 prevalence at GIScience 2021 workshop on Advancing Movement Data Science (AMD’21). Click for Hoeyun's blog post!
Geng Tian updates us on how he is doing in China, working on a very cool project - unmanned vehicles delivering food! Click for Geng's blog post!
Kaitlyn Hom and Mark Rifkin, both senior high school students, joined our lab this summer to participate in the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Click for Kaitlyn's blog post!
Angelina Evans worked as an intern in the US Department of Energy's prestigious Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program in the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Click for Angelina's blog post!
Associate Professor
Geographical and Sustainability Sciences
University of Iowa
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
M.A. in Geography
B.S. in Geography, Geographic Information Science / B.S. in Music Performance
Ph.D. in Geography / GIScience
M.A. in Geography / GIScience
B.S. in Geography / Minor in Computer Science & M.S. in Geoinformatics
B.S. in Geography, Geographic Information Science
B.S. in Geography / Geographic Information Science
B.S. in Informatics
| 2024 | Ariana Luan, Devesh Aggarwal, Sumin Bae |
| 2023 | Kelvin Liu,Rongxuan Zhu |
| 2022 | Adelina Chau,Jonathan Fan |
| 2021 | Kaitlyn Hom, Mark Rifkin |
Spatial interactions are the movements of tangible and intangible phenomena such as people, goods, vehicles and information between locations. Spatial interactions form location-to-location networks. Analysis of spatial interaction networks is critical for diverse domains such as migration, epidemics, health care, transportation, and economy. Flow maps are commonly used to visualize spatial interactions and facilitate the understanding of patterns of spatial flows and the corresponding spatial context.
Understand the spatial, temporal and relational (network) aspects of dynamic spatial-social networks. A dynamic geo-social network evolves (changes) over space and time as the actors of the network move (migrate), new actors are added or removed, and relationships between the actors develop and change over time.
Support a human-centered process for pattern searching and knowledge construction through geovisual analytics and usability evaluation.
Provide a data-driven understanding of the complex system of human society and the physical environment through the novel implementation and application of geospatial artificial intelligence.
Big data analytics for social media and networking applications, e.g., geospatial semantics, natural language processing, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, machine learning and deep learning methods.
We offer a diverse set of degrees and research experiences for graduate, undergraduate and high school students through the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences, and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program at Informatics (IGPI), and the Secondary Student Training Program (SSTP) at the University of Iowa.
Graduate teaching and research fellowships, and assistantships are available for competitive students. Before applying, please contact Caglar Koyluwith your brief research interests and CV attached. Competitive students will be invited for a Skype interview. The interview starts with a 6 minute, 40 second, a Pecha Kucha style presentation. Your presentation should focus on your current work, future research goals and interests, and how those intersect with the Lab's research agenda.
In addition to the above research interests, students should have, or be interested in developing, ability in: