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Seminar Abstract: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has produced substantial impacts on our society. Wastewater surveillance has increasingly been introduced to support the monitoring of COVID-19 outbreaks and transmission. Monitoring of buildings and sub-sewershed areas via a wastewater surveillance approach has been a cost-effective strategy for mass testing of residents in congregate living situations such as universities. A series of spatial and spatiotemporal data are involved with wastewater surveillance, and this data must be interpreted and integrated with other information to better serve as guidance on response to a positive wastewater signal. The management and analysis of this data poses a significant challenge, in particular, for the need of supporting timely decision making. In this study, we present a web-based spatial decision support system (SDSS) framework to address this challenge. Our study area is the main campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Instructor Biosketch: Wenwu Tang is the Executive Director of the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science and Associate Professor at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Wenwu holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Iowa and was a Post-doc and Research Scientist at the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include cyberinfrastructure and high-performance geocomputation, agent-based modeling, land change modeling, Web GIS, and their geospatial applications such as public health. Tang has over 90 peer-reviewed publications and two edited books. Wenwu's research has been supported by federal and state funding agencies (about $4.9 million in total), including USDA Forest Services, US CDC, US Fish and Wildlife, NCDOT, NC Forest Service, and Electric Power Research Institute. Relevant courses that Wenwu has taught include CyberGIS and Big Data, Spatial Statistics, and Web GIS. Since 2020, Wenwu has been working as a geospatial expert on the wastewater surveillance program (led by Dr. Cynthia Gibas) to assist UNC Charlotte for the monitoring of COVID-19 on campus and in the Charlotte metropolitan region.