Ninghua Wang

Academics:

I am Ninghua(sounds like NING-HWA), or Nathan. I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student from the joint geography program of San Diego State University and University of California, Santa Barbara. Yes, I spend my Ph.D. in two gorgeous beach towns.

Research:

I am fascinated by geographic patterns. I enjoy reading maps and gaining insights from the patterns shown on map. I study urban structures, crime hot spots, human travel trajectories, and state boundaries.

Expertise:

As a geographer, I am also good at making fancy maps. I have a suite of mapping software. I was an engineer by training so I can do programming in many computer languages, Matlab and R. Also if you have any issue related to spatial analysis (means you need to work with spatial data), let me know. I may have some idea.

Plan:

I want a deeper understanding of complex science, its history and current development. Also I would like to expend my knowledge on Information Theory. Hopefully I can have a draft paper by the end of my SFI summer school.

Project:

There are several projects I am working on, used to work on before but still want more, and plan to do in future.

I have an ABM on crime behavior, specifically about robbery. The simulation results show that robbers have clear tendency to rob at particular locations, known as crime hotspots. Based on that, I tried different policing strategies to crack down crimes. While the location-oriented policing is the most effective strategy, its outcome is mixed, depending on the initial condition, a phenomenon common in complex system. Currently this work is halfway to be published but I have some new hypotheses I would like to test when I have time.

I also want to know the 'fitness' of statistical methods in analyzing complex system. Particularly I want to examine survival analysis and the multilevel model. I use ABM to generate a complex human-environment interaction system, and apply the survival model and the multilevel model to that system to detect the key mechanisms I have programmed in the ABM. By changing the level of nonlinearity, emergence

just came up an idea of studying the boundaries of African countries using spatial ABM. The boundaries of African countries, drew two centuries ago during the age of imperialism, was once considered arbitrary but remain quite stable till now. I am wondering that simple boundary negotiation principle may apply to the case here. So I would like to prove it with a spatial ABM.

Survival Analysis and Multilevel modeling

Crime behavior (robbery)

Digital Divide

Land use change and demographic change

Clustering trajectories of climate data

Personal Interests:

Hiking, Jogging, Skiing, Basketball, Badminton, Photography, Salsa and Argentina Tango.