Dr Daniel Arribas-Bel, a senior lecturer in Geographic Data Science at the University’s Department of Geography and Planning, is the recipient of the inaugural CARTO `Spatial Data Scientist of the Year’ award.
Dr Arribas-Bel is a member of the University’s Geographic Data Science Lab and an ESRC Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He is also part of the development team of the open source library PySAL for spatial analysis in Python; and created contextily, a small Python package to use web tile services in static maps.
Falling within the University’s Digital theme, Dr Arribas-Bel research interests combine urban studies, computational methods, and new forms of data and he has published in journals including PLOS ONE, Demography, Geographical Analysis and Environment and Planning.
Dr Arribas-Bel was selected by the CARTO scientific committee against the following criteria: use of new types of data, impact of projects and innovation in methodology.
On receiving the award, he said: “I’m thrilled to receive this award and extremely humbled by the recognition from the CARTO committee.
“I’m particularly excited about the fact that part of the decision for the award was my work to nurture community.
“Geographic/Spatial Data Science is a team sport, and it is impossible to think of any of my contributions without the role of collectives like the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool, teams like the PySAL developers, and communities like that one around the CARTO conference.”
The award was announced at the CARTO Spatial Data Conference 2020, the world’s largest event for spatial data scientists from both the public and private sector, and academia.