HOME / ABOUT /

News

Plot map of the US; legend includes Pediatric Hospitals, ZIP Code Population Centroids, and OD Pairs

Travel Time Estimation for Geospatial Big Data: A case study of healthcare accessibility in the USA

June 6, 2023

by Xiaokang Fu, Devika Kakkar, and Jeff Blossom
    

Introduction

Estimating drive times is crucial and essential in various fields, such as urban planning, transportation engineering, business management, public health, and healthcare accessibility studies. In public health and medical service accessibility research it is crucial to estimate the travel time between patient locations and health services, clinics, or hospitals... Read more about Travel Time Estimation for Geospatial Big Data: A case study of healthcare accessibility in the USA

Mac Pro in the Knafel computer lab

Powerful computing in comfortable surroundings: the IQSS Computer Labs welcome all of Harvard

May 24, 2023

by Danielle Benaroche Gottesman
 

Nestled within the bustling atmosphere of Harvard’s Knafel Building—a site largely known for government and international studies—is a high-end refuge humming with a buzz of its own. The best part? It’s always open, and it’s filled with some of the most cutting-edge technology and software available... Read more about Powerful computing in comfortable surroundings: the IQSS Computer Labs welcome all of Harvard

Downward view of CGIS Knafel's spiral staircase

Where to now? Outgoing IQSS graduate affiliates share their next steps

May 23, 2023

The IQSS community includes a cohort of graduate students in programs all across Harvard University and active in a wide range of social science research. The end of the academic year always brings with it the departure of some of those graduate students as they finish their Harvard programs and while it is a bittersweet time for us, we are excited to see what our graduating affiliates have waiting for them on the next steps of their journeys. Below is a collection of updates from a few of those affiliates going on to continue their work beyond Harvard.

2023 Outgoing Graduate...

Read more about Where to now? Outgoing IQSS graduate affiliates share their next steps
People scattered across a very hazy space

IQSS Dataverse joins NIH-funded collaboration on climate change and health

May 18, 2023

by Liz Salazar
 

The Dataverse Project at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science will be joining an effort by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Boston University School of Public Health to create a new research center, thanks to a $6.7 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ will be a Research Coordinating Center (RCC)... Read more about IQSS Dataverse joins NIH-funded collaboration on climate change and health

Summer Staffing

May 10, 2023
Summer is once again upon us, and with it, the annual change to staffing as our student staff graduates or goes home for the Summer. During this time, staffing may not be consistent, so we encourage all of our patrons to please email us at iqsslabs@harvard.edu if they need help and are unable to find anyone at the helpdesk. We are available Monday - Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM. Read more about Summer Staffing
two orange rings interlocked and stacked vertically with the text IQSS

IQSS Welcomes WashU into Magaro Peer Pre-Review Consortium

April 19, 2023

by Liz Salazar
 

The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University is expanding the Alexander and Diviya Magaro Peer Pre-Review Program—a service that aims to improve scholarship by accelerating the journal submission process—to develop a multi-institutional consortium. The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis is the first affiliate to partner with IQSS and to add its own network of associate editors and peer reviewers to Harvard’s cohort... Read more about IQSS Welcomes WashU into Magaro Peer Pre-Review Consortium

Police officer confronts BLM protester in Georgia in 2020

Crime and Police Reform In America—Does Politics Matter?

April 3, 2023

by Courtney Hayes
 

On May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost 10 minutes. Floyd’s death sparked the largest mass protest movement in U.S. history and a national reckoning on race and police reform.

In the fall of 2020, the pressure to act was heating up. Not only were protestors calling for radical reform, but crime rates were spiking. Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose 30%—the largest single-year increase in more than a century. And, as the election season approached, former President Donald Trump began blaming Democratic mayors... Read more about Crime and Police Reform In America—Does Politics Matter?

cga_squared_1.jp

CGA develops RINX: An Open-Source Solution for Information Extraction from Big Raster Datasets

March 27, 2023

By Devika Kakkar and Jeff Blossom
 

Processing Earth observation data modeled in a time-series of raster format is critical to solving some of the most complex problems in geospatial science ranging from climate change to public health. Researchers are increasingly working with these large raster datasets that are often terabytes in size. At this scale, traditional GIS methods may fail to handle this processing and new approaches are needed to analyze these datasets. The objective of this work is to develop methods to interactively analyze big raster datasets with the goal of most efficiently extracting vector data over specific time periods from any set of raster data... Read more about CGA develops RINX: An Open-Source Solution for Information Extraction from Big Raster Datasets