Sara Lafia

About

I am a Research Fellow in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. My current research is supported by an NSF project, Developing Evidence-based Data Sharing and Archiving Policies, where I am using machine learning to analyze data usage, curation activities, and data citations.

I hold a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara and I use my background in GIScience to study how people search for information. My interests also include spatial software development, innovative GIS education, and Semantic Web technologies.

Imagery Credit: UCSB Aerial Photography Collection (San Gabriel Mountains, 1952)

Projects

Multi-Level Research Topic Maps

Conversational Surf Recommender

Self-Organizing Research Map

Core Concepts of Spatial Information

Research Trajectory Treemaps

Damage Proxy Mapping for Disasters

Publications

Lafia, S., Thomer, A., Bleckley, D., Akmon, D., and Hemphill, L. (in press). Leveraging Machine Learning to Detect Data Curation Activities. In Proceedings of 17th IEEE eScience 2021, Innsbruck, Austria, September 20-23. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). arXiv:2105.00030

Lafia, S., Zhu, R., Regalia, B., and Kuhn, W. (2021). Reimagining GIS Instruction through Concept-Based Learning. AGILE: GIScience Series, 2, 1-7. doi:10.5194/agile-giss-2-6-2021

Lafia, S., Kuhn, W., Caylor, K., and Hemphill, L. (2021). Mapping Research Topics at Multiple Levels of Detail. Patterns, 100210. doi:10.1016/j.patter.2021.100210

Hervey, T., Lafia, S., and Kuhn, W. (2020). Search Facets and Ranking in Geospatial Dataset Search. 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.I.5

Lafia, S., Last, C., and Kuhn, W. (2019). Enabling the Discovery of Thematically Related Research Objects with Systematic Spatializations. In 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2019.18

Lafia, S., Xiao, J., Kuhn, W., and Hervey, T. (2019). Talk of the Town: Discovering Government Data via Conversational Voice Assistants. In 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2019.10

Seltmann, K., Lafia, S., Paul, D., James, S., Bloom, D., Rios, N., ... and Davis, E. (2018). Georeferencing for Research Use (GRU): An integrated geospatial training paradigm for biocollections researchers and data providers. Research Ideas and Outcomes, 4, e32449. doi:10.3897/rio.4.e32449

Lafia, S. and Kuhn, W. (2018). Spatial Discovery of Linked Research Datasets and Documents at a Spatially Enabled Research Library. Journal of Map and Geography Libraries, 1-19. doi:10.1080/15420353.2018.1478923

Coggins, B. L., Lafia, S., and Torghabeh, B. V. (2018). Dramatic change in North Korea: Instability and human flight propensity. North Korean Review, 14(1), 49-70. ISSN:1551-2789

Lafia, S., Turner, A., and Kuhn, W. (2018). Improving Discovery of Open Civic Data. In 10th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2018). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.GISCIENCE.2018.9

Allen, C., Hervey, T., Lafia, S., Phillips, D. W., Vahedi, B., and Kuhn, W. (2016). Exploring the Notion of Spatial Lenses. In International Conference on Geographic Information Science. Springer, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-45738-3_17

Lafia, S., Jablonski, J., Kuhn, W., Cooley, S. and Medrano, F. A. (2016). Spatial discovery and the research library. Transactions in GIS, 20: 399–412. doi:10.1111/tgis.12235

Golubovic, N., Krintz, C., Wolski, R., Lafia, S., Hervey, T., and Kuhn, W. (2016). Extracting Spatial Information from Social Media in Support of Agricultural Management Decisions. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval. ACM. doi:10.1145/3003464.3003468

Lafia, S. and Staehli, L. (2016). From Research Objects to Research Networks: Combining Spatial and Semantic Search. In SDW @GIScience: Proceedings of the Workshop on Spatial Data on the Web (pp. 35-40). ISSN:1613-0073