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Computational Cognitive Geography

My research concerns the real-world environments we live in—buildings, neighborhoods, city squares, and metropolitan regions—and the cognitive processes and skills we apply to learn the layout of those surroundings, navigate to far-off destinations, decide where to spend our time, and other such spatial and geographic tasks. To carry out my research, I use smart-phones, GPS, Web applications, geographic information systems, among other pieces of technology. My goal with each research project is to both answer some questions about human spatial cognition and to develop a tool that's of practical use, helping designers to build livable and lively places and people to better enjoy their surroundings.

Let me call this blend of basic and applied research computational cognitive geography: developing technical tools to study and improve how people learn, explore, remember, and use built environments.

Cognitive Surveyor: In-field, Piecemeal Measurement

I've been developing Cognitive Surveyor, a mobile/distributed geographic information system to measure individuals' travel patterns and spatial knowledge in a piecemeal, automated fashion.

• Source code available under the GPLv3 license for the Cognitive Surveyor server and mobile Android client. Please contact me with questions.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2011). The world in the head: Measuring people's spatial knowledge and travel patterns using mobile devices. Dissertation in the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2010). Cognitive Surveyor: A tool for user-centered urban design. Poster presented at the GeoDesign Summit, Redlands, Calif., 6-8 January 2010.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2008). Cognitive surveying: A framework for mobile data collection, analysis, and visualization of spatial knowledge and navigation practices. In C. Freksa, et al. (Eds.) Spatial Cognition 2008, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 5248 (pp. 138-153).

Computational Models of Environmental Form

Being able to model the physical form of built environments in a computational manner is of great use to researchers studying spatial cognition and professionals planning and designing buildings and cities—or at least, at present, there is much promise to both in these modeling techniques.

• Environmental Modeling: Using Space Syntax in Spatial Cognition Research workshop and tutorial at Spatial Cognition 2010
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2009). Extracting cognitively relevant measures from environmental models. In D. Koch, L. Marcus, & J. Steen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Space Syntax Symposium (pp. 024:1-8), Stockholm, Sweden, 8-11 June 2009.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2008). Modeling environmental form to predict students’ spatial knowledge of a university campus. Master's thesis in the Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience area of the Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2007) Modeling environmental form to predict students' spatial knowledge of a university campus. Poster presented at the Conference on Spatial Information Theory, Melbourne, Australia. September, 2007.
• Dara-Abrams, D. Urban form shapes spatial knowledge. Poster presented at the Spatial Cognition conference, Bremen, Germany. September, 2006.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2006). Architecture of mind and world: How urban form influences spatial cognition. Paper in B. Hillier, C. Hölscher, R. Conroy Dalton, & A. Turner (Eds.), Space syntax and spatial cognition (Workshop at Spatial Cognition). Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2006). Ground truthing space syntax. Paper in K.-F. Richter & U.-J. Rüetschi (Eds.), The cognitive approach to modeling environments (Workshop at Geographic Information Science, Münster; SFB/TR 8 Report No. 009-08/2006). Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen. (pp. 23-28) [presentation slides with useful figures]

Spatial Abilities

I'm interested in the spatial abilities people use to learn, navigate, and remember large-scale environments.

• Schinazi, V., Dara-Abrams, D., Epstein, R., Nardi, D., Newcombe, N., & Shipley, T. (2010).
From the real to the virtual world: Individual differences in navigation. Talk at Spatial Cognition 2010.
• Hegarty, M., Crookes, R. D., Dara-Abrams, D., & Shipley, T. (2010). Do all science disciplines rely on spatial abilities? Preliminary evidence from self-report questionnaires. Paper to be presented at Spatial Cognition 2010.
• Dara-Abrams, D., & Hegarty, M. (2007). Learning the layout of a new building: A longitudinal, real-world study. Poster presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, California, November 15-18, 2007.
• Dara-Abrams, D. (2004). Our spatial knowledge of the built world. Poster presented at All-Science Poster Session, Carleton College, 8 Oct. 2004.

Location Based Services

With Martin Raubal and Kai-Florian Richter, I'm studying how people navigate and learn their way around cities using smart-phone location based services. We've created an architecture that developers can follow to better ensure that their LBS take into account the cognitive principles identified in our behavioral studies.

• Richter, K.-F., Dara-Abrams, D., Raubal, M. (2010). Navigating and learning with location based services: A user-centric design. Paper to be presented at the 7th International Symposium on LBS and TeleCartography.

As part of the UCSB Interactive Digital Multimedia IGERT, I was involved in a multi-year project to develop an automated mobile tour guide system called Minotour:

• Hecht, B., Dara-Abrams, D., Starosielski, N., Goldsberry, K., Dillemuth, J., & Roberts, J. (2007). Minotour: A location-aware mobile tour application that weaves a spatial tale from Wikipedia, Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, Apr. 17-21, 2007.
• Hecht, B., Starosielski, N, & Dara-Abrams, D. (2007). Generating educational tourism narratives from Wikipedia. Paper presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2007 Fall Symposium, Washington, D.C. , Nov. 8-11, 2007.