Publications

Jun, 2026

ORNL Report

A Comprehensive Comparison of Building Height Products at a Global Level

The built environment continues to expand due to increasing human populations with some projections indicating additional growth of 2.5 billion persons by 2050. Buildings are a key component of the built environment and information on building height and urban morphology in general can help to better understand and address a host of development and urban planning issues in…

Jun, 2026

Conference Paper

Secure Route: Roadway Risk Mapping for Transportation Planners

The secure transport of sensitive materials across U.S. road networks pose unique challenges for local, state, and federal agencies. Threats range from random events (e.g., accidents, medical emergencies, mechanical failures) to opportunistic or organized tactical assaults. Although the probability of such attacks is very low, the consequences of material loss to foreign s…

Apr, 2026

ORNL Report

Morphology-Based Building Use-Type Modeling: Learnability-First Schema Discovery

Mar, 2026

Conference Paper

Empirically Categorizing the Built Environment in Relation to Height

Buildings are a core component of the urban environment and affect human populations, energy usage, city development, city planning, and urban heat islands. Buildings span an enormous range of sizes, from a 2m tall shelter to the Burj Khalifa; and at the same time there are widely recognized categories of similar buildings, with homes, office buildings, or skyscrapers as s…

Jan, 2026

Journal

LandScan mosaic enables high-resolution gridded population estimates with explicit uncertainty

Gridded population datasets represent high-resolution distributions of human occupancy, enabling informed decision-making across a broad range of fields. These data products are valuable for assessing environmental risk, urban development, disaster preparedness and resource allocation—areas where accurate population estimates directly enhance policy effectiveness and optim…

Dec, 2025

Journal

LandScan HD: A High-Resolution Gridded Ambient Population Methodology for the World

Unwarned population distributions accounting for routine human activities are needed to address many global human security challenges, including disasters, conflict, and infrastructure demand. LandScan High Definition (LSHD) supports this need through gridded ambient population estimates that measure average human presence between daytime and nighttime at a high spatial re…

Apr, 2025

Journal

A segmented approach to modeling building height: Delineating high-rise and low-rise buildings for enhanced height estimation

Understanding building height is imperative to the overall study of energy efficiency, population distribution, urban morphologies, emergency response, among others. Currently, existing approaches for modeling building height at scale are hindered by two pervasive issues. First, there is no consistent approach to quantify what a high-rise building is at a macro scale, leav…

Sep, 2024

Journal

Evaluation of Digital Nautical Chart data for confirmation and expansion of GeoNames data

This work examines how Digital Nautical Chart (DNC) data may contribute to the evolution and refinement of GeoNames data for near-shore features. GeoNames features are point data with one or more possible place names. DNC Earth Cover Text (ECRText) objects are map labels positioned nearby their real word counterpart. ECRText feature map position strikes a compromise betwee…

Aug, 2024

Journal

Inferring building height from footprint morphology data

As cities continue to grow globally, characterizing the built environment is essential to understanding human populations, projecting energy usage, monitoring urban heat island impacts, preventing environmental degradation, and planning for urban development. Buildings are a key component of the built environment and there is currently a lack of data on building height at…

Dec, 2023

Journal

Near real time monitoring and forecasting for COVID-19 situational awareness

In the opening months of the pandemic, the need for situational awareness was urgent. Forecasting models such as the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model were hampered by limited testing data and key information on mobility, contact tracing, and local policy variations would not be consistently available for months. New case counts from sources like John Hopkins Un…

Dec, 2023

Journal

revengc: An R package to Reverse Engineer Summarized Data

Decoupled (e.g. separate averages) and censored (e.g. > 100 species) variables are continually reported by many well-established organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and World Bank. The challenge therefore is to infer what the original data could have been given summarized information. We present an R…

Dec, 2023

Journal

Apache Spark Accelerated Deep Learning Inference for Large Scale Satellite Image Analytics

The shear volumes of data generated from earth observation and remote sensing technologies continue to make major impact; leaping key geospatial applications into the dual data and compute-intensive era. As a consequence, this rapid advancement poses new computational and data processing challenges. We implement a novel remote sensing data flow (RESFlow) for advancing mach…