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UB National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA)

NCGIA at Buffalo (hereafter ‘the Center’) has focused its missions on excellence in GIScience research and provide services to UB and local communities.

About

In addition to its international and national influence among research communities, the Center has established a research infrastructure on campus that links to a large number of departments within a number of schools. A critical mass of researchers is effectively associated with the Center, its core faculty, and its missions. The current research strengths at NCGIA-Buffalo lie in multiple aspects of GIScience: ontology/semantics, remote sensing, systems science, and spatial statistics, along with the domain expertise of the core GIScience faculty in Earth systems, social and behavioral, and health sciences. Presently the Center houses and supports a number of competitive grants from NSF, NIH and several other proposals are under review. The Center maintains strong ties to the GIS community in the WNY area that create ample opportunities to accomplish UB’s mission in economic development while offering employment opportunities to our graduates at all levels. After two decades’ hard and creative work, the Center is widely recognized as valuable resources to UB and the GIScience community at large.

In response to the challenges in GIScience and national research agenda, the Center is positioned to lead and support campus-wide initiatives in Big Data research in the context of two rapidly growing areas of excellence at UB: (1) Smart Health and (2) Environmental Informatics. Both areas involve on-line social media, sensor systems, and cyber-computing. The growth in these two areas can build on the existing GIScience infrastructure, critical mass of researchers and expertise, and the local GIS community, while resonating with goals stated in the Realizing UB2020 plan. NCGIA-Buffalo has been and will continue to organize a series of activities, including proposal development, funding opportunity seminars, speaker series, and conferences. These activities will cultivate interests across the campus and leverage current research strengths to achieve the above goals.