Spatial Analysis Research Group (SpARG)

The Spatial Analysis Research group is involved in a group of projects whose common denominator is the development of analytic methods for spatial research. The group is comprised of PhD, MA , BA students augmented from time to time by foreign interns on short-term stays.
Currently, the research group has two major foci of interest. The first relates to the development of spatial tools and methods for real estate analysis. These include a GIS-based method for delivering and visualizing real estate data based on hedonic estimation.
The second major area of interest relates to developing tools for improving urban resilience to emergency events and unanticipated disasters. These include earthquakes, flooding, tsunamis, wildfires, industrial accidents and missile attacks. In conjunction with a parallel research group from IRIDeS (International Research Institute for Disaster Science) at Tohoku University, Japan an agent based model is being developed for simulating the way in which cities return to equilibrium post-disaster. The SpARG group is developing analytical models for assessing emergency evacuation, the operation and recovery of the labor market in disaster situations, assessing building damage, estimating the propensity to acquire insurance cover amongst different socio-economic groups and generating big synthetic socio-economic data for the purposes of simulation. This suite of tools is being developed as part of the dim2sea project (DIM2SEA.huji.ac.il).