Upcoming Event: 5th Annual Meeting of the Japan Association on Geographical Space (JAGS)

I am very pleased to announce that I will be presenting about my ongoing research about Spatial Terrorism Vulnerability Analysis at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Japan Association on Geographical Space (JAGS) on Saturday, June 30th 2012. The conference will be held at the Tōkyō Campus of Tsukuba University. The location is Ōtsuka 3-29-1, Bunkyo, Tōkyō (東京都文京区大塚3-29-1). For further details please refer to the conference website (in Japanese). This is a great opportunity to introduce my research to an (almost) exclusively Japanese audience.

Wrap-up: 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)

From February 24th to 28th the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) was held in New York City, NY. Due to the large number of participants (~8,600) and sessions offered (~3,500) the conference was held in both the Hilton New York and the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers. The conference ended more than one month ago, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to write down my comments about it earlier.

I have been trying to attend as many sessions as possible, and after detailed preparation have been able to attend a session in every time slot offered, except during the two field trips I participated in. Furthermore, I presented my own research in one session.

This is a summary of the sessions I attended and the most interesting papers and topics covered there. (The numbers in brackets refer to the session IDs in the conference program.)

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Upcoming Event: 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)

From February 24th to 28th, 2012, the Association of American Geographers (AAG) is inviting everybody interested to its 2012 Annual Meeting to New York City. This will be a great opportunity to hear about (and see in action) the latest trends and ideas in geography, GIS, and spatial analysis in more than 4,000 paper and poster presentations as well as several workshops and field trips.

I, too, will be involved in a so-called Interactive Short Paper Session titled “Highlights in Spatial Analysis and Modelling”, where I will give a brief 5 minute overview of my current research in a slot titled “Spatial Analysis of Terrorism Vulnerability”, followed by a panel discussion together with the other seven presenters of this session. The session will be held on Sunday, February 26th, from 8:00 AM to 9:40 AM in a room called Sutton Parlor Center on the 2nd floor of the Hilton New York, one of the two conference venues.

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Nailing Down Vulnerability

The main topic of my research is the vulnerability of urban areas for terrorism. But what exactly is vulnerability, and how can it be defined and operationalized? There are many discussions going on about these questions in the social sciences community. Albeit only very few of them are related to terrorism threats, the ideas and approaches presented there turn out to be very useful for me in finding my very own definition – in nailing down the quite abstract idea of vulnerability into a quantifiable measure.

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