1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Polar Data Science (PolDS 2025)

Please join us in congratulating Chhaya on her successful dissertation defense. Chhaya successfully defended her PhD dissertation on Thursday, April 24, 2025. 

Chhaya has been an invaluable member of the iHARP and UMBC community. Starting Fall 2025, Chhaya will be joining the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University as an Assistant Professor. We look forward to seeing Chhaya grow in her new role as a faculty member  and continue her passion for deep and meaningful research. 

Congratulations to Chhaya on all of her hard work!!! iHARP wishes her great success in her next adventure!

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Dissertation Title: Multi-Contextual Learning in Spatiotemporal Neighborhoods

Committee:

• Dr. Vandana Janeja (UMBC), Chair

• Dr. Jianwu Wang (UMBC)

• Dr. Karuna Joshi (UMBC)

• Dr. Bayu Adhi Tama (UMBC/iHARP)

• Dr. Nicole Schlegel (NOAA)

Abstract:

This dissertation presents a multi-contextual learning framework within spatiotemporal neighborhoods to tackle analytical challenges in Earth observation data. The rapid rise in the amount of environmental data —as demonstrated by the European Space Agency's Copernicus program expanding from 2 to 20 petabytes per year and NASA's Earth Observing System producing 16 terabytes per day—poses difficulties to conventional analytical methods for managing multi-source data fusion, cross-scale pattern recognition, and spatial autocorrelation.

The work develops a context-aware spatiotemporal data analysis approach with a neighborhood-based spatiotemporal framework at its foundation. The framework employs Voronoi tessellation for micro-neighborhood generation and attribute-based grouping for macro-neighborhood generation. By incorporating contextual information from spatial proximity and attribute similarity, the approach captures nuanced patterns that traditional methods tend to ignore.

This multi-contextual learning framework is validated through two complementary application domains that serve as case studies. The Greenland Ice Sheet case demonstrates how the application of neighborhood analysis successfully encapsulates intricate melt behavior, accounting for local variability and interactions between temperature, albedo, and other variables. Digital twin simulations form a second test case by demonstrating that the same neighborhood-based approach is capable of delineating areas with analogous variance structures within high-resolution atmospheric data.

The methodological contributions of the dissertation are: (1) multi-contextual learning for spatiotemporal neighborhood formation; (2) Graph Deviation Networks for multivariate anomaly detection in such neighborhoods; (3) a comparative framework for the validity verification of data sources; and (4) spatial clustering for variance analysis. Each component tackles intrinsic challenges in spatiotemporal data analysis while offering practical solutions for environmental monitoring application scenarios. Results indicate that multi-contextual learning in spatiotemporal neighborhoods substantially enhances detection and interpretation capability for complex Earth observation data, with immediate implications for environmental monitoring, modeling, and satellite-based observational systems.ralize for multiple downstream tasks and can be extended to other domains beyond Earth Science.

• Yuchuan Huang, UMN iHARP PhD Student, will join Databricks in Mountain View, California, to work on the Open Source Apache Spark project, focusing on developing new Spark SQL features and enhancing Spark performance and user experience. 

• Subhankar Ghosh, UMN iHARP PhD Student, will join the Climate Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee to work on Diffusion Models for climate downscaling tasks as part of ORBIT: Oak Ridge Base Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability. 

• Tolulope Ale, UMBC iHARP PhD Candidate, will join Microsoft Corporation to work on machine learning and statistical modeling techniques for handling large-scale data, contributing to innovative solutions in computer hardware and software. 

Congratulations to all three! We can’t wait to see you grow and the impact you’ll make.