rant@usc.edu / (213) 740-0739 / AHF B57E
2017 Ph.D., Geography and Urban Regional Analysis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2012 B.S., Remote Sensing Science and Technology, Wuhan University, China
Dr. Ran Tao is a lecturer with the Spatial Sciences Institute in the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Tao’s research interests center on geographic information science (GIS) and its applications. He has been making contributions to the GIScience literature through developing innovative spatial analytical methods that blend the latest techniques in spatial statistics, data mining, geovisualization, and geocomputation. He has also been leading or been involved in collaborative research projects which exert the power of GIS to a variety of domains, such as transportation and movement analysis, motor vehicle theft crime, and territorial control in civic conflicts.
His recent and current research projects have included:
ESDA + Flow: developing three exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) methods for massive spatial flow data in movement, migration, and crime events;
Territorial Control in Civil Conflicts: developing a GIS approach (now available as QGIS plugin) to modeling territorial control in violent armed conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa through network analysis on a hybrid transportation network;
GIS + MVT: applying GIS and spatial association rules to reveal the spatiotemporal patterns of motor-vehicle theft (MVT) crime events in Charlotte, NC.
He serves as a reviewer for Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Scientia Iranica, Transactions in GIS, and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.
Recent Publications:
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill. (2018). flowAMOEBA: Identifying Regions of Anomalous Spatial Interactions, forthcoming in Geographical Analysis.
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill, Craig Depken, II, Mona Kashiha. (2017). Flow HDBSCAN: A Hierarchical and Density-Based Spatial Flow Cluster Analysis Method. In Proceedings of UrbanGIS '17:3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Analytics. Redondo Beach, CA, USA.
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill. (2016). A Density-Based Spatial Flow Cluster Detection Method. In the Ninth International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience2016) Short Paper Proceedings. Montreal, Canada: 288–291.
Ran Tao, Daniel Strandow, Michael Findley, Jean-Claude Thill, James Walsh. (2016). A Hybrid Approach to Modeling Territorial Control in Violent Armed Conflicts. Transactions in GIS, 20(3): 413–425.
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill. (2016). Spatial Cluster Detection in Spatial Flow Data. Geographical Analysis 48(4): 355–372.
Ran Tao, Jean-Claude Thill, and Ikuho Yamada. (2015). Detecting Clustering Scales with the Incremental K-Function: Comparison Tests on Actual and Simulated Geospatial Datasets. In V. Popovich, M. Schrenk, K. Korolenko, and C. Claramunt (editors), Information Fusion and Geographic Information Systems (IF&GIS'2015). Springer, Heidelberg, Germany: 93–107.
