Research Seminar: When GIS meets COVID 19: digital health geography at the national and global level
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Date
30 Sep 2022
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Organiser
Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI)
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Time
10:00 - 11:00
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Venue
online via Zoom
Speaker
Dr Siqin WANG, Sisi
Enquiry
Ms Anna Choi 3400 8158 anna.choi@polyu.edu.hk
Summary
Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced a mental health crisis. Social media data offer a unique opportunity to track the mental health signals of a given population and quantify their mental reaction towards COVID-19. Sisi’s team conducted a series of studies related to the digital health geography to address the mental health issue during the global pandemic by integrating GIS framework and skills with the traditional epidemiology and public health. They employed the advanced GeoAI techniques (e.g., machine learning sentiment analysis) and large-scale social media data (e.g., geotweets) to monitor, track and map mental health signals in the US, Australia and more recently across +200 countries in the world. This talk will introduce these empirical studies in different countries and focus on the global-scale study that utilized 2.1 billion individual-level geotagged tweets posted between 1 February 2020 and 31 March 2021 to measure and map the shifts in negativity across 217 countries and unpack its relationship with COVID-19 policies. Findings reveal that countries with more stringent policies were associated with lower levels of negativity, however such a relationship weakened in later phases of the pandemic. This study offers a novel framework to monitor mental health signals globally, helping international authorizations, including the United Nations and World Health Organization, to design smart country-specific mental health initiatives in response to future public emergencies.
Keynote Speaker
Dr Siqin WANG, Sisi
Research Fellow
Japan Society of Promotion of Sciences (JSPS)
Dr Siqin (Sisi) Wang holds the PhD in Geography from University of Queensland, Australia (2015-2018), the Master in GIScience from Northern Illinois University, US (2009-2011) and the Bachelor in Urban Planning from Sun Yat-Sen University, China (2004-2009). In 2011-2015, she worked as the GIS analyst in the Arizona State Government, US and GIS manager in IT companies in San Francisco and Hawaii, US to gain rich experience in the GIS industry. She worked at University of Queensland as a postdoc research fellow in 2018-2019 and associated lecturer in 2020-2022. She is currently working as the Japan Society of Promotion of Sciences (JSPS) research fellow nominated by Australian Academy of Sciences and funded by JSPS since April 2022. Her research interests lie in developing and applying methods and frameworks of GIScience (i.e., GIS, remote sensing, spatial analysis and web mapping) and big data analytics (e.g., AI, machine/deep learning, and spatial econometrics) to solve real-world problems in the urban environment, particularly in the domain of human mobility and migration, digital health geography, built environment, social vulnerability in climatic hazard planning, and human-environment interactions. Since her PhD conferral in 2018, she has 43 peer-reviewed journal articles (32 in Q1 journals), as the first/co-first/corresponding author in 30 articles. She is the chief/principal investigator in four research projects funded by JSPS and Australian Urban Research Institute and Network, Department of Transport Seed Theme and the participatory investigator in four research projects funded by Australian Research Council. She was awarded as the Top 20 Global Cutting-edge Young Scientist (2022), the First Prize and People’s Choice Prize in research showcase at UQ (2015), the Associate of American Geographers (AAG) Travel Award (2012) and Best Paper Presentation in AAG (2011). She currently acts as the Associate Chair of Future Data Lab affiliated to Harvard University, the awarded member of International Geographic Honour Society, the editorial board member of International Journal of Digital Earth, the guest editor of International Journal of Applied Earth Observations and Geoinformation, and the reviewer of +20 international journals.
