Andrew Crooks
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Crooks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Crooks |
| SIGNATURE | CROOKS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5034-6654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Exploring fear in urban environments: Place and space analysis of social media data
Connecting Senses: The Cross‐Modal Associations Between Smell and Vision in Understanding Urban Environments
Smell is a crucial yet understudied sensory dimension in urban environments, bridging tangible elements (e.g., exhaust, flowers) with intangible impacts on emotions, social interactions, and well‐being. While geographical and urban research increasingly acknowledges multisensory experiences, much of geospatial analysis still emphasized the visual dimension. This research advances spatial thinking by examining cross‐modal associations between smel…
Not just numbers: Understanding cities through their words
Cities and disasters: What can urban analytics do
Generative AI and urban modeling
Mapping the Invisible: Decoding Perceived Urban Smells Through Geosocial Media in New York City
Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate themselves to the environment both physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This article aims to construct a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban s…
Community resilience to wildfires: A network analysis approach by utilizing human mobility data
Environment and Planning B: Its shaping of urban modeling and me
My first exposure
Leveraging newspapers to understand urban issues: A longitudinal analysis of urban shrinkage in Detroit
Today we are awash with data, especially when it comes to studying cities from a diverse data ecosystem ranging from demographic to remotely sensed imagery and social media. This has led to the growth of urban analytics providing new ways to conduct quantitative research within cities. One area that has seen significant growth is using natural language processing techniques on text data from social media to explore various issues relating to urba…
EPB turns 50 years old: An analytical tour of the last five decades
The history of Environment and Planning B (EPB) over the last 50 years has been described in detail by Batty (2024, this issue) while different eras and topics have been highlighted within the invited commentaries that comprise this 50th anniversary special issue.Harris (2024, this issue), in particular, discusses the recent change in the latter part of the journal's name from Planning and Design to Urban Analytics and City Science.This reflects …
Exploring the new frontier of information extraction through large language models in urban analytics
Information propagation on cyber, relational and physical spaces about covid-19 vaccine: Using social media and splatial framework
Leveraging Street Level Imagery for Urban Planning
There is an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if the picture or image is geographical in nature? With popular sites like Flickr and Instagram, and high quality cameras and GPS in smartphones, a proliferation of georeferenced photographs have become available. Unsurprisingly, they have been the subject of much research interest. In addition to geographical coordinates, they have date and time stamps, which allows for a …
Future Developments in Geographical Agent‐Based Models: Challenges and Opportunities
Despite reaching a point of acceptance as a research tool across the geographical and social sciences, there remain significant methodological challenges for agent‐based models. These include recognizing and simulating emergent phenomena, agent representation, construction of behavioral rules, and calibration and validation. While advances in individual‐level data and computing power have opened up new research avenues, they have also brought wit…
Urban data/code: A new EP-B section
Shaping urbanization to achieve communities resilient to floods
Flood risk is increasing in urban communities due to climate change and socioeconomic development. Socioeconomic development is a major cause of urban expansion in flood-prone regions, as it places more physical, economic, and social infrastructure at risk. Moreover, in light of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations, it has become an international imperative to move toward sustainable cities. Current approaches to quan…
Youth and Their Artificial Social Environmental Risk and Promotive Scores (Ya-TASERPS): An Agent-Based Model of Interactional Theory of Delinquency
Risk assessments are designed to measure cumulative risk and promotive factors for delinquency and recidivism, and are used by criminal and juvenile justice systems to inform sanctions and interventions. Yet, these risk assessments tend to focus on individual risk and o en fail to capture each individual's environmental risk. This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) which explores the interaction of individual and environmental risk on the …
Organizing Theories for Disasters into a Complex Adaptive System Framework
Increasingly urbanized populations and climate change have shifted the focus of decision makers from economic growth to the sustainability and resilience of urban infrastructure and communities, especially when communities face multiple hazards and need to recover from recurring disasters. Understanding human behavior and its interactions with built environments in disasters requires disciplinary crossover to explain its complexity, therefore we …
Achieving situational awareness of drug cartels with geolocated social media
A Thematic Similarity Network Approach for Analysis of Places Using Volunteered Geographic Information
The research presented in this paper proposes a thematic network approach to explore rich relationships between places. We connect places in networks through their thematic similarities by applying topic modeling to the textual volunteered geographic information (VGI) pertaining to the places. The network approach enhances previous research involving place clustering using geo-textual information, which often simplifies relationships between plac…
Crowdsourcing Street View Imagery: A Comparison of Mapillary and OpenStreetCam
Over the last decade, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as a viable source of information on cities. During this time, the nature of VGI has been evolving, with new types and sources of data continually being added. In light of this trend, this paper explores one such type of VGI data: Volunteered Street View Imagery (VSVI). Two VSVI sources, Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, were extracted and analyzed to study road coverage and co…
Insights into human-wildlife interactions in cities from bird sightings recorded online
Responses to mass shooting events: The interplay between the media and the public
Research Summary Public mass shootings tend to capture the public's attention and receive substantial coverage in both traditional media and online social networks (OSNs) and have become a salient topic in them. Motivated by this, the overarching objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of how the public responds to mass shooting events in such media outlets. Specifically, it aims to examine whether distinct information seeking pat…
Examining Emergent Communities and Social Bots Within the Polarized Online Vaccination Debate in Twitter
Many states in the United States allow a 'belief exemption' for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines. People's opinion on whether or not to take the vaccine can have direct consequences in public health. Social media has been one of the dominant communication channels for people to express their opinions of vaccination. Despite governmental organizations' efforts of disseminating information of vaccination benefits, anti-vaccine sentiment i…
A Critical Review of High and Very High-Resolution Remote Sensing Approaches for Detecting and Mapping Slums: Trends, Challenges and Emerging Opportunities
Slums are a global urban challenge, with less developed countries being particularly impacted. To adequately detect and map them, data is needed on their location, spatial extent and evolution. High- and very high-resolution remote sensing imagery has emerged as an important source of data in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to critically review studies that have used such data to detect and map slums. Our analysis shows that while such …
Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds
The study of slums as social and physical constructs: Challenges and Emerging Research Opportunities
Over 1 billion people currently live in slums, with the number of slum dwellers only expected to grow in the coming decades. The vast majority of slums are located in and around urban centres in the less economically developed countries, which are also experiencing greater rates of urbanization compared with more developed countries. This rapid rate of urbanization is cause for significant concern given that many of these countries often lack the…
Measuring slum severity in Mumbai and Kolkata: A household-based approach
Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing
The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be …
Examining Emergent Communities and Social Bots Within the Polarized Online Vaccination Debate in Twitter
Many states in the United States allow a 'belief exemption' for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines. People's opinion on whether or not to take the vaccine can have direct consequences in public health. Social media has been one of the dominant communication channels for people to express their opinions of vaccination. Despite governmental organizations' efforts of disseminating information of vaccination benefits, anti-vaccine sentiment i…
Responses to mass shooting events: The interplay between the media and the public
Research Summary Public mass shootings tend to capture the public's attention and receive substantial coverage in both traditional media and online social networks (OSNs) and have become a salient topic in them. Motivated by this, the overarching objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of how the public responds to mass shooting events in such media outlets. Specifically, it aims to examine whether distinct information seeking pat…
Organizing Theories for Disasters into a Complex Adaptive System Framework
Increasingly urbanized populations and climate change have shifted the focus of decision makers from economic growth to the sustainability and resilience of urban infrastructure and communities, especially when communities face multiple hazards and need to recover from recurring disasters. Understanding human behavior and its interactions with built environments in disasters requires disciplinary crossover to explain its complexity, therefore we …
Demarcating new boundaries: Mapping virtual polycentric communities through social media content
The proliferation of social media has led to the emergence of a new type of geospatial information that defies the conventions of authoritative or volunteered geographic information, yet can be harvested to reveal unique and dynamic information about people and their activities. In this paper we address the identification and mapping of global virtual communities formed around issues of specific national interest. We refer to these connected virt…
International Relations: State-Driven and Citizen-Driven Networks
The international community can be viewed as a set of networks manifested through various transnational activities. The availability of longitudinal data sets such as international arms trades and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) allows for the study of state-driven interactions over time. In parallel to this top-down approach, the recent emergence of social media is fostering a bottom-up and citizen-driven avenue for international relation…
Modeling the emergence of riots: A geosimulation approach
Assessing the impact of demographic characteristics on spatial error in volunteered geographic information features
Key challenges in agent-based modelling for geo-spatial simulation
Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing
The authors describe how we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data. The authors begin with GMapCreator that lets users fashion new maps using Google Maps as a base. The authors then describe MapTube that enables users to archive maps and demonstrate how it can be used in a variety of contexts to share map information, to put existing maps into a form that can be …
Harvesting ambient geospatial information from social media feeds
Slumulation: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Slum Formations
Slums provide shelter for nearly one third of the world's urban population, most of them in the developing world. Slumulation represents an agent-based model which explores questions such as i) how slums come into existence, expand or disappear ii) where and when they emerge in a city and iii) which processes may improve housing conditions for urban poor. The model has three types of agents that influence emergence or sustenance of slums in a cit…
Demarcating new boundaries: Mapping virtual polycentric communities through social media content
The proliferation of social media has led to the emergence of a new type of geospatial information that defies the conventions of authoritative or volunteered geographic information, yet can be harvested to reveal unique and dynamic information about people and their activities. In this paper we address the identification and mapping of global virtual communities formed around issues of specific national interest. We refer to these connected virt…
International Relations: State-Driven and Citizen-Driven Networks
The international community can be viewed as a set of networks manifested through various transnational activities. The availability of longitudinal data sets such as international arms trades and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) allows for the study of state-driven interactions over time. In parallel to this top-down approach, the recent emergence of social media is fostering a bottom-up and citizen-driven avenue for international relation…
Assessing the impact of demographic characteristics on spatial error in volunteered geographic information features
Measuring slum severity in Mumbai and Kolkata: A household-based approach
Crowdsourcing urban form and function
Urban form and function have been studied extensively in urban planning and geographical information science. However, gaining a greater understanding of how they merge to define the urban morphology remains a substantial scientific challenge. Toward this goal, this paper addresses the opportunities presented by the emergence of crowdsourced data to gain novel insights into form and function in urban spaces. We are focusing in particular on infor…
Exploring Creativity and Urban Development with Agent-Based Modeling
Scholars and urban planners have suggested that the key characteristic of leading world cities is that they attract the highest quality human talent through educational and professional opportunities. They offer enabling environments for productive human interactions and the growth of knowledge-based industries which drives economic growth through innovation. Both through hard and soft infrastructure, they offer physical connectivity which foster…
Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak: Action Items for Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response
Modeling the emergence of riots: A geosimulation approach
The study of slums as social and physical constructs: Challenges and Emerging Research Opportunities
Over 1 billion people currently live in slums, with the number of slum dwellers only expected to grow in the coming decades. The vast majority of slums are located in and around urban centres in the less economically developed countries, which are also experiencing greater rates of urbanization compared with more developed countries. This rapid rate of urbanization is cause for significant concern given that many of these countries often lack the…
Geovisualization of Social Media
The proliferation of social media over the last decade is presenting substantial computational challenges associated with the management, processing, analysis, and visualization of the corresponding massive volumes of data. Furthermore, this new form of information also imposes newfound challenges upon the geographical community due to the unique nature of its content, as analyzing such data calls for a hybrid mix of spatial and social analysis. …
Cellular Automata
Cellular automata (CA) are a class of models where one can explore how local actions generate global patterns through well‐specified rules. In such models, locations are represented by cells that are arranged in space, often in a regular lattice or tessellation. Each cell makes decisions based on its current and past characteristics, and those of its neighbors. Patterns emerge from these simple decisions, such as different forms of urban growth o…
A Critical Review of High and Very High-Resolution Remote Sensing Approaches for Detecting and Mapping Slums: Trends, Challenges and Emerging Opportunities
Slums are a global urban challenge, with less developed countries being particularly impacted. To adequately detect and map them, data is needed on their location, spatial extent and evolution. High- and very high-resolution remote sensing imagery has emerged as an important source of data in this regard. The purpose of this paper is to critically review studies that have used such data to detect and map slums. Our analysis shows that while such …
An Agent-Based Model of Rural Households’ Adaptation to Climate Change
Future climate change is expected to have greater impacts on societies whose livelihoods rely on subsistence agricultural systems. Adaptation is essential for mitigating adverse e ects of climate change, to sustain rural livelihoods and ensure future food security. We present an agent-based model, called OMOLAND-CA, which explores the impact of climate change on the adaptive capacity of rural communities in the South Omo Zone of Ethiopia. The pur…
Projecting cropping patterns around Poyang lake and prioritizing areas for policy intervention to promote rice: A cellular automata model
Examining Emergent Communities and Social Bots Within the Polarized Online Vaccination Debate in Twitter
Many states in the United States allow a 'belief exemption' for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines. People's opinion on whether or not to take the vaccine can have direct consequences in public health. Social media has been one of the dominant communication channels for people to express their opinions of vaccination. Despite governmental organizations' efforts of disseminating information of vaccination benefits, anti-vaccine sentiment i…
A Thematic Similarity Network Approach for Analysis of Places Using Volunteered Geographic Information
The research presented in this paper proposes a thematic network approach to explore rich relationships between places. We connect places in networks through their thematic similarities by applying topic modeling to the textual volunteered geographic information (VGI) pertaining to the places. The network approach enhances previous research involving place clustering using geo-textual information, which often simplifies relationships between plac…
Crowdsourcing Street View Imagery: A Comparison of Mapillary and OpenStreetCam
Over the last decade, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has emerged as a viable source of information on cities. During this time, the nature of VGI has been evolving, with new types and sources of data continually being added. In light of this trend, this paper explores one such type of VGI data: Volunteered Street View Imagery (VSVI). Two VSVI sources, Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, were extracted and analyzed to study road coverage and co…
Insights into human-wildlife interactions in cities from bird sightings recorded online
Responses to mass shooting events: The interplay between the media and the public
Research Summary Public mass shootings tend to capture the public's attention and receive substantial coverage in both traditional media and online social networks (OSNs) and have become a salient topic in them. Motivated by this, the overarching objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of how the public responds to mass shooting events in such media outlets. Specifically, it aims to examine whether distinct information seeking pat…
Future Developments in Geographical Agent‐Based Models: Challenges and Opportunities
Despite reaching a point of acceptance as a research tool across the geographical and social sciences, there remain significant methodological challenges for agent‐based models. These include recognizing and simulating emergent phenomena, agent representation, construction of behavioral rules, and calibration and validation. While advances in individual‐level data and computing power have opened up new research avenues, they have also brought wit…
Urban data/code: A new EP-B section
Computer Science (31 works) · Geography (26 works) · Data science (16 works) · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Land Use and Ecosystem Services (12 works) · Social media (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · World Wide Web (11 works) · Engineering (9 works)