Events
1. SDSU Showcases SDHEART Research and GeoAI Innovation at Esri User Conference 2026
From July 13 to 17, 2026, San Diego State University faculty, researchers, and students participated in the 2026 Esri User Conference at the San Diego Convention Center in downtown San Diego, California. The exhibit showcased the NSF-funded San Diego Homelessness and Health Equity Research Team (SDHEART) project and its use of GeoAI, GIS, remote sensing, surveys, interviews, and Esri tools to analyze changing homelessness patterns and support outreach and policy decisions. Dr. Gabriela Fernandez, Dr. Audrey Beck, Sam, Olivia, Alexandra, and Jill presented “Bridging Data and Dignity: Data-Driven Insights into the Unhoused Community in San Diego, California,” while Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou, Tim, and Craig presented “Using ArcGIS Dashboard to Visualize Dynamic Changes in the Homeless Population.” These two presentations, together with Esri’s March 2026 ArcWatch feature, “Geospatial Technology Transforms Research on Homelessness in San Diego County,” demonstrated SDSU’s continued application of Big Data, GeoAI, and community-engaged research to regional homelessness challenges.
2. 2026 SDHEART Summer Workshop (May 29, 2026)
On May 29, 2026, the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age at San Diego State University hosted the SDHEART Summer Workshop, “Collaborating on Homelessness Research with Community Stakeholders in San Diego”. The project PI and Co-PI invited 31 stakeholders and researchers—including city officials, university researchers, nonprofit leaders, and major homelessness service organizations from across San Diego County—to share research and outreach initiatives, gather community feedback, build collaborations around innovative data-driven solutions, and help shape regional strategies for addressing homelessness and health equity.
3. AAG 2026
Our team participated in the 2026 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, from March 17 to 21, 2026. During the conference, the team organized four sessions that showcased its research on homelessness, human mobility, and GeoAI.
4. 2026 S3 Symposium
In 2026, SDSU student teams presented ten projects at the S3 Symposium, sharing research and innovations on border-region women’s health and gendered violence, the 2025 SDHEART surveys, mobile-clinic and street-medicine outreach, homeless encampment detection and visualization, human mobility prediction, marine microplastic monitoring, and border surveillance. Presenters included Rita Herfi, Pilar De Haro, Jesus Garcia Hernandez, Eddie Rosas, Marina Sannes, Olivia Pugsley, Alexandra Nguyen, Jillian O’Keeffe, Hetty Zhang, Nhan Le, Ashley Funk, Annie Mewkill, Shangyu Lou, Timothy Boyd, Craig Lewis, Dipsy Dipsy, Siddharth Suresh Babu, Kawther Kaziz, Sayali Sanjay Shelke, Alice Wilshire, Pranjal Patel, and Palash Vijaykumar Suryawanshi. Olivia Pugsley, Jillian O’Keeffe, and Alexandra Nguyen won the Graduate Research Scholarship and Creative Activities Excellence Award for “Unhoused in San Diego, California: Results from the 2025 SDHeart Surveys.”
5. 2025 COP 30 Digital Innovation Pavilion
On November 19, 2025, the Metabolism of Cities Living Lab at San Diego State University and the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California hosted a COP30 Digital Innovation Pavilion session featuring the Chiara Project. This binational initiative used geospatial dashboards, storytelling, and community surveys to reveal gendered inequalities in health, violence, and surveillance along border regions. View the session recording and presentation slides.
6. SDSU Global Campus Showcases Big Data Innovation at ESRI User Conference 2025
From July 14 to 18, 2025, San Diego State University’s Global Campus participated in the ESRI User Conference at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, where it hosted a booth for the first time. Global Campus staff Kevin Brown, Kirsten Sterling, and Lance Stinnet, along with BDA faculty Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou and Dr. Gabriela Fernandez, highlighted the online Master of Science in Big Data Analytics program, student-led Big Data and GeoAI projects, and the NSF-funded SDHEART research project (NSF Award #2417568). A key result was an interactive, 3D-printed scale model of downtown San Diego that visualized homelessness density with color-coded data, demonstrating how artificial intelligence, remote sensing, and GIS can map changing homelessness patterns and support community-engaged research.
7. Homeless Outreach Event
On March 26 and May 7, 2025, our team participated in Homeless Outreach Events in collaboration with SDSU, SDDP, and MTS. The team distributed hygiene kits, engaged directly with community members, and collected preliminary data to support its ongoing homelessness research.
8. 2025 Big Data Hackathon
The 2025 theme is “Innovating to Tackle Homelessness in San Diego County” focusing on data-driven and technology-inspired solutions to improve access, wellbeing, and opportunity for unhoused communities. This event was held on November 8 and November 15, 2025. For more details, please visit our website at: Big Data Hackathon for San Diego 2025
Here is the 2025 Big Data Hackathon Report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uHKCxr9Fj5z0d4iBFRgT0CKa27sQyJce/preview
9. The 2025 SDSU Student Symposium took place on Friday February 28, 2025. We had many outstanding students participate on this event:
https://sdheart.sdsu.edu/s3-symposium/
- Jiachen Wang
- Xinyu Du
- Anna Mewkill
- Alexandra Nguyen
- Olivia Pugsley
10. The 2025 Annual Meeting of AAG (American Association of Geographers) is hosted in Detroit, MI, March 24 – March 28, 2025.
Our project PI (Tsou), Co-PI (Nara), and graduate students organized three organized sessions: Human Mobility, Vulnerable Population, and Homelessness Studies: Exploring Spatiotemporal Changes, Socio-Environmental Impacts, and GeoAI Applications.
11. 2025 SDHEART Summer Workshop (June 6, 2025)
On June 6, 2025, the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) at San Diego State University hosted the SDHEART Summer Workshop, “Collaborating on Homelessness Research with Community Stakeholders in San Diego,” . The project PI and Co-PI brought together 25 stakeholders and researchers from across San Diego County—including city officials, university researchers, nonprofit leaders, and major homelessness service organizations—to share research and outreach initiatives, gather community feedback, strengthen collaboration around innovative data-driven solutions, and help shape regional strategies for addressing homelessness; group photos documented the workshop and its participants.