Ming-Hsiang Tsou

 

Professor of Geography, Big Data Analytics Program Director
Storm Hall 313C | (619) 594-0205 | [email protected]
Curriculum Vitae | Personal Web Site

Ming-Hsiang (Ming) Tsou is a Professor in the Department of Geography, San Diego State University (SDSU) and the Founding Director of Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA). He received a B.S. (1991) from National Taiwan University, an M.A. (1996) from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Ph.D. (2001) from the University of Colorado at Boulder, all in Geography. His research interests are in Human Dynamics, Social Media, Big Data, Visualization, Cartography, Web GIS, High
Performance Computing (HPC), Mobile GIS, and K-12 GIS education. He is co-author of Internet GIS, a scholarly book published in 2003 by Wiley and served on the editorial boards of the Annals of GIS (2008-), Cartography and GIScience (2013-), the Professional Geographers (2011-2019), International Journal of Digital Earth (2022 -) and International Journal of Geographic Information Science (2019-).  Tsou was the Chair of the Cartographic Specialty Group (2007-2008), the Chair of Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group (2012-2013) in the Association of American Geographers (AAG), and the co-chair of the NASA Earth Science Enterprise Data System Working Group: Standard Process Group (SPG) from 2004 to 2007. He has been served on two U.S. National Academy of Science Committees: “Research Priorities for the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science” (2006-2007) and “Geotargeted Alerts and Warnings: A Workshop on Current Knowledge and Research Gaps” (2012- 2013).

Dr. Tsou has received over $5.27 million extramural funding, as PI or Co-PI, and $28.77 million funding as Co-Investigators, from NASA, NSF, NIH, USFS, and several state and local government agencies. In 2010, Tsou was awarded to a $1.3 million research grant funded by National Science Foundation and served as the Principal Investigator (PI) of, "Mapping ideas from Cyberspace to Realspace" research project (2010-2014). This NSF-CDI project integrates GIS, computational linguistics, web search engines, and social media APIs to track and analyze public-accessible websites and social media (Twitter) for visualizing and analyzing the diffusion of information and ideas in cyberspace. In Spring 2014, Tsou established a new research center, Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA), a transdisciplinary research area of excellence at San Diego State University to integrate research works from GIScience, Public Health, Social Science, Sociology, and Communication. Tsou is the founding director of the HDMA Center. In Fall 2014, Tsou received a NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research (IBSS) award (PI) for “Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social Networks” (Award#1416509, $999,887, 2014-2018). This large interdisciplinary research project studies human dynamics across social media and social networks, focusing on information diffusion modeling over time and space, and the connection between online activities and real-world human behaviors (including disaster evacuation, vaccine exemption). Tsou is also involved with several GIS education projects for K-12 and higher education. He has served on the AP GIS&T course advisory board at AAG and a senior researcher in the National GeoTech Center, and the Geospatial Technology Coordinator in California Geographic Alliance to promote GIS education in universities, community colleges and high schools. Tsou conducted professional GIS training workshops for high school teachers from various disciplines annually at San Diego State University over ten years (2009 - 2018).

In 2019, Dr. Tsou established a new Big Data Analytics Program (Master of Science) at San Diego State University and served as the founding program director of the Big Data Analytics Program starting in Fall 2019 semester. The SDSU Big Data Analytics (BDA) Program is a transdisciplinary program across technology, business, engineering, science, and social science domains leading to a Master of Science Degree in Big Data Analytics. The two-year program operates in a collaborative and active transdisciplinary educational environment for students and professionals who wish to advance their knowledge and skills in the fast growing fields of data science and data analytics. In 2020, Tsou created a research web hub for COVID-19 outbreaks and the mapping services of medical vulnerable population in San Diego. He is collaborating with several SDSU faculty from Public Health, Linguistics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Communication to develop a predictive model for COVID-19 spread patterns and to examine the geographic variations in social contexts, social determinants of health (SDOH), and their influence on minority population and health disparities in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Tsou has published 118 refereed articles, two books, and one National Research Council Report. In 2023, Tsou is included in the World’s Top 2% of Scientists List based on his publication records published by Stanford University.