GeoSpatial Information Scientist specializing in full-stack development of OpenStreetMap data analysis systems to holistically explore the evolution of both the community and the map. I collaborate closely with other researchers, organizations, and corporations in the global OpenStreetMap community. Google Scholar | OpenStreetMap Diary | GitHub | LinkedIn

Experience

Software Engineer 2023 -

Meta Platforms, Inc.

Research Scientist 2022 - 2023

Meta Platforms, Inc.

Post-Doctoral Research Associate 2019 - 2022

University of Colorado Boulder

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science2019

University of Colorado Boulder.
Research Assistant to Leysia Palen and Kenneth M. Anderson
Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis)

M.S., Computer Science 2017

University of Colorado Boulder

B.A., Computer Science, Mathematics2012

Carroll College - Helena, Montana

Publications

Journal Papers

Benjamin Herfort, Sven Lautenbach, João Porto de Albuquerque, Jennings Anderson, and Alexander Zipf (2023). A spatio-temporal analysis investigating completeness and inequalities of global urban building data in OpenStreetMap. Nature Communications 14, 2985. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-39698-6

Dipto Sarkar and Jennings Anderson (2022). Corporate Editors in OpenStreetMap: Investigating Co-Editing Patterns. Transactions in GIS, 2022;00,1-19. doi:10.1111/tgis.12910

Benjamin Herfort, Sven Lautenbach, João Porto de Albuquerque, Jennings Anderson, and Alexander Zipf (2021). The evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community. Nature Scientific Reports 11, 3037. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82404-z

Patricia Solís, Jennings Anderson, and Sushil Rajagopalan (2020). Open Geospatial Tools for Humanitarian Data Creation, Analysis, and Learning through the Global Lens of YouthMappers Journal of Geographical Systems. doi:10.1007/s10109-020-00339-x

Jennings Anderson, Dipto Sarkar, and Leysia Palen (2019). Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap ISPRS International Journal of GeoInformation 2019, 8, 232. doi:10.3390/ijgi8050232

Julie L. Demuth, Rebecca E. Morss, Leysia Palen, Kenneth M. Anderson, Jennings Anderson, Marina Kogan, Kevin Stowe, Melissa Bica, Heather Lazrus, Olga Wilhemi, and Jennifer Henderson (2018). “Sometimes da #beachlife ain’t always da wave”: Understanding People’s Evolving Hurricane Risk Communication, Risk Assessments, and Responses Using Twitter Narratives. Weather, Climate, and Society, 10(3), 537-560. doi:10.1175/WCAS-D-17-0126.1

Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, Brian Keegan, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson (2018). The Crowd is the Territory: Assessing Quality in Peer-Produced Spatial Data During Disasters. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. doi:10.1080/10447318.2018.1427828

Rebecca E. Morss, Julie L. Demuth, Heather Lazrus, Leysia Palen, C. Michael Barton, Chris A. Davis, Chris Snyder, Olga V. Wilhelmi, Kenneth M. Anderson, David A. Ahijevych, Jennings Anderson, Melissa Bica, Kate R. Fossell, Jennifer Henderson, Marina Kogan, Kevin Stowe, and Joshua Watts (2017). Hazardous Weather Prediction and Communication in the Modern Information Environment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 98, 2653–2674.

Conference Proceedings

Jennings Anderson and Timmera W. Omidire (2022). Increasing OpenStreetMap Data Accessibility with the Analysis-Ready Daylight Distribution of OpenStreetMap: A Demonstration of Cloud-Based Assessments of Global Building Completeness In: Minghini, M., Liu, P., Li, H., Grinberger, A.Y., & Juhász, L. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at State of the Map 2022, 19 - 21 August 2022, Florence, Italy. [Video]

Veniamin Veselovsky, Dipto Sarkar, Jennings Anderson, and Robert Soden (2022). An Automated Approach to Identifying Corporate Editing. In Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 16th International Conference on Web and Social Media (AAAI ICWSM-22). June 6 - 9, 2022. Atlanta, Georgia.

Lindsay Diamond, Hande Batan, Jennings Anderson, and Leysia Palen (2022). The Polyvocality of Online COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives that Invoke Medical Racism. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 2022). April 30 - May 5, 2022. New Orleans, Louisiana. Honorable Mention [Video Summary]

Yinxiao Li, Jennings Anderson, and Yiqi Niu (2021). Vandalism Detection in OpenStreetMap via User Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, New York, USA, 3232–3236. DOI:dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3459637.3482213.

Dipto Sarkar and Jennings Anderson (2021). Community interactions in OSM editing. Presented at the State of the Map 2021 (SotM 2021), online: Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5112211

Yinxiao Li and Jennings Anderson (2021). Introducing OpenStreetMap User Embeddings: Promising Steps Toward Automated Vandalism and Community Detection. Presented at the State of the Map 2021 (SotM 2021), online: Zenodo. Extended Abstract: doi:10.5281/zenodo.5112241

Jennings Anderson and Dipto Sarkar (2020). Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap. In: Minghini, M., Coetzee, S., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. [Video]

Jennings Anderson, Dipto Sarkar, and Leysia Palen (2020). Corporate Editing in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Investigation of the Impact to the Map and the Community. In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 17-18. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. [Video]

Jennings Anderson, Gerard Casas Saez, Kenneth M. Anderson, Leysia Palen, and Rebecca Morss (2019). Incorporating Context and Location Into Social Media Analysis: A Scalable, Cloud-Based Approach for More Powerful Data Science. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Maui, Hawaii. Best Paper Nomination.

Jennings Anderson, Marina Kogan, Melissa Bica, Leysia Palen, Kevin Stowe, Kenneth M. Anderson, Rebecca Morss, Julie Demuth, Heather Lazrus, Olga Wilhelmi, and Jennifer Henderson (2016). Far Far Away in Far Rockaway: Responses to Risks and Impacts during Hurricane Sandy through First-Person Social Media Narratives. In Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2016), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Marina Kogan, Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, Kenneth M. Anderson and Leysia Palen (2016). Finding the Way to OSM Mapping Practices: Bounding Large Crisis Datasets for Qualitative Investigation. In Proceedings of CHI ‘16.

Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, Kenneth M. Anderson, Marina Kogan, and Leysia Palen (2016). EPIC-OSM: A Software Framework for OpenStreetMap Data Analytics. In Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 5467-5477. PDF

Leysia Palen, Robert Soden, T. Jennings Anderson, and Mario Barrenechea (2015). Success & Scale in a Data-Producing Organization: The Socio-Technical Evolution of OpenStreetMap in Response to Humanitarian Events. In Proceedings of CHI ‘15. 4113-4122.

Shideh Dashti, Leysia Palen, Mehdi Heris, Kenneth M. Anderson, Scott Anderson, and Jennings Anderson (2014). Supporting Disaster Reconnaissance with Social Media Data: A Design-Oriented Case Study of the 2013 Colorado Floods. In Proceedings of the Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2014). 632-641. Best Paper Nomination

Workshop Papers (In Proceedings)

Jennings Anderson (2020). Analyzing OpenStreetMap Contributions at Scale: Introducing osm-interactions Tilesets. 3rd Workshop on Quality of Open Data at Business Information Systems 2020, Online (COVID19: Colorado Springs, Colorado). In Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP, volume 394) pp. 267-271. [Video]

Kevin Stowe, Martha Palmer, Jennings Anderson, Marina Kogan, Leysia Palen, Kenneth M. Anderson, Rebecca Morss, Julie Demuth, and Heather Lazrus (2018). Developing and Evaluating Annotation Procedures for Twitter Data during Hazard Events. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018), Santa Fe, New Mexico. 133–143.

Kevin Stowe, Jennings Anderson, Martha Palmer, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson (2018). Improving Classification of Twitter Behavior During Hurricane Events. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, held with the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), Melbourne, Australia.

Melissa Bica and Jennings Anderson. (2016) “You Are What You Tweet”: The Ethics of (Re)Publishing Public Data as Crafted Narratives. Workshop on Ethical Encounters in HCI research at CHI ‘16

Other

Feye Andal, Manjurul Islam, Ataur Rahman Shaheen, and Jennings Anderson (2023) Understanding YouthMappers’ Contributions to Building Resilient Communities in Asia; Ebenezer N. K. Boateng, Zola Manyungwa, and Jennings Anderson Assessing YouthMappers Contributions to the Generation of Open Geospatial Data in Africa; Jennings Anderson, Chad Blevins, Nuala Cowan, Dara Carney-Nedelman, Courtney Clark, Michael Crino et al. Reflecting on the YouthMappers Movement In: Patricia Solís and Marcela Zeballos (editors) Open Mapping towards Sustainable Development Goals. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-05182-1

Jennings Anderson (2019) Contributor-centric Analytics for OpenStreetMap: Approaches to Full Stack, Metadata-driven Analysis Infrastructure for an Open Geospatial Data Platform. PhD. Dissertation, University of Colorado Boulder. July 31, 2019. [Video]

Jennings Anderson and Grant Williams (2014). “Reflections and Advice from Two Former ICM Competitors” in The Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling: Culturing Interdisciplinary Problem Solving. Ed. Chris Arney and Paul J. Campbell. Bedford, MA: COMAP, 17-26.

T. Jennings Anderson, Philip Rose, Mark Parker, and Gillian Glaes (2012) The Mathematics of Cryptography and Data Compression. Honors Thesis. Carroll College.

Presentations

Conference Presentations

OSMUS Community Chronicles: Exploring the growth and patterns of mapping in OSM in North America. OpenStreetMap US Connect 2020. (Virtual Conference) October 30, 2020. [Video]

Jennings Anderson and Seth Fitzsimmons. Postcards from the Edge: A Tour of OSM Data Analyses + Visualizations. State of the Map US 2019. Minneapolis, Minnesota. September 6, 2019. [Video, Blog]

Human-Centered Data Science and OpenStreetMap: Contributor-Centric OpenStreetMap Analysis Infrastructure. State of the Map 2018. Milan, Italy. July 29, 2018. [Video]

Watching the Map Grow. State of the Map US. Boulder, CO. October 22, 2017. [Video]

Mikel Maron and Jennings Anderson. OpenStreetMap US by the Numbers For the Community. State of the Map US, Seattle, WA. July 23, 2016. [Video]

Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, Marina Kogan, Kenneth Anderson, and Leysia Palen. A Real Need for Real-Time OpenStreetMap Analytics. Annual Meeting for the Assocation of American Geographers (AAG 2016). San Francisco, California. March 31, 2016. [Slides]

Robert Soden, Jennings Anderson, Marina Kogan, Ken Anderson, and Mikel Maron (2015). The Social Life of OpenStreetMap: What Can We Know from the Data?  New Tools and Approaches. Annual Meeting for the Assocation of American Geographers (AAG 2015). Chicago, Illinois. April 24, 2015. Presentation

Invited Talks

Contributor-Centric Analytics for OpenStreetMap. Department of GeoInformation, University of Heidelberg
October 8, 2019

Visualizing Billions of Edits to OpenStreetMap. Auraria library GIS day event. Denver, CO [Video]
November 14, 2018

Workshops

Hands On Experience Extracting Meaningful OSM Data by Using Amazon Athena with AWS Public Datasets. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team 2019 Summit. Heidelberg, Germany. September 19, 2019. [Workshop]

Jennings Anderson and Seth Fitzsimmons. OpenStreetMap Data Analysis Workshop. State of the Map US 2018. Detroit, Michigan. October 5, 2018.

Big Human Data: Data by Humans, For Humanitarian Needs. NSF Sponsored Data Science Workshop. University of Washington, Seattle. August 5-7, 2015. Poster

Professional Research Experience

GeoInformation Scientist & Technical Consultant to YouthMappers2019 -

Designed, built, and continue to develop new metrics and techniques to track and visualize the mapping activity and community growth of the YouthMappers project. Member of Steering committee. activity.youthmappers.org.

Visiting Researcher Fall 2019

Heidelberg Institute of GeoInformation Technology (HeiGIT)

Research Fellow at Mapbox2016; 2017

I built interactive maps and data visualizations in collaboration with the data team to institute and validate the concept of contributor-centric intrinsic quality metrics for OpenStreetMap. I presented the results of this work at the State of the Map US conferences. mapbox.github.io/osm-analysis-collab.

Service

Program Committees

State of the Map 2021 Scientific Committee. Proceedings

State of the Map 2021. Online (2021.stateofthemap.org)

State of the Map 2020. Online (2020.stateofthemap.org)

State of the Map 2019. Heidelberg, Germany (2019.stateofthemap.org)

State of the Map US 2019. Minneapolis, Minnesota (2019.stateofthemap.us)

Organizing Committee

State of the Map US 2017. Boulder, CO. (2017.stateofthemap.us)

Reviewing

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW, JCSCW); Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI); Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS); Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS); International Conference on Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM, JISCRAM); International Journal of GeoInformation (IJGI); International Journal of HCI (IJHCI); MobileHCI; State of the Map (SotM); State of the Map Academic Track; State of the Map US (SOTMUS); Transactions in GIS.

Teaching Experience

Guest Lectures

Social Computing & Volunteered Geographic Information. INFO 1111: Understanding the World Through Data. Nov 1, 2018

Social Computing & Volunteered Geographic Information. ENVS 5100: Creating Usable Science. October 15, 2018

GeoSpatial Data Visualization. INFO 4602/5602: Information Visualization. January 23, 2018

GeoSpatial Data & Crisis Informatics. INFO 1111. October 2017

GeoSpatial Data. INFO 1111. Oct 27 & Nov 1, 2016

OpenStreetMap & Webmapping. CSCI 4830. Spring 2015 and Spring 2016

Software Engineering Teaching Assistant2013 - 2014

Teaching Assistant to Judith Stafford (2013) and Ifeyinwa Okoye (2014) for CS 3308: Software Methods & Tools at University of Colorado Boulder. Focus was on Software-as-a-Service web technologies using Ruby on Rails for development.
Guest Lecture: SaaS Security (April 11, 2014)

Other Experience

Montana Backcountry Yurts, LLC2018 -

Co-Owner and CTO of a Montana based company focused on providing access and lodging to backcountry skiers and snowboarders. montanabackcountryyurts.com

Maptime Boulder2013 - 2019

Co-Organizer of a local chapter of the international geospatial focused Meetup. Meets monthly to discuss open geospatial data technologies and put on workshops. maptime.io/boulder

Catan Enterprises, LLC.2011 - 2020

Co-Owner and of Property Management Company specializing in sustainable, energy efficient construction and high-efficiency infill development. Constructed a 1500 sq. ft. super-insulated home between July 2011 and October 2012. catanenterprises.com

Engineers Without Borders: Carroll College Student Chapter2009 - 2012

Directed 25 students as Chapter President (2011). Developed and maintained partnerships with Kiwanis, Rotary, and Helena, MT based engineering firms to support projects in Mexico and Guatemala. Traveled to Guatemala three times to design a clean-water system and perform a structural reinforcement project for a local school of 500 students.

Carroll Adventure & Mountaineering Program 2010 - 2012

Co-Chair of Carroll College’s outdoor program. Organized and led trips into the Montana Wilderness. Taught Telemark Skiing and Rock Climbing clinics for students. Certified Wilderness First Responder.

Montana Gear Up 2010; 2011; 2012; 2013

Counselor for a state grant funded summer camp for middle school students from low-income school districts across Montana. The Gear Up program promotes postsecondary education for all Montana students. mus.edu/GearUp

Steamboat Mountain School 2004 - 2008

Attended the Steamboat Mountain School (formerly Lowell Whiteman). Participant in the Global Immersion Studies program.

Awards, Scholarships, Competitions

Department of Computer Science Outstanding Research Assistant 2018

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program: Honorable Mention 2015

Department of Computer Science Outstanding Research Assistant 2014

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program: Honorable Mention 2014

Graduate Student Research Community Development Award 2013

Thomas G. Stewart Award in Computer Science (Carroll College) 2012

COMAP Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling: Meritorious Winner 2012

COMAP Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling: Finalist (Top 2%) 2011

COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling: Meritorious Winner 2010

Merit-Based Trustee Scholarship at Carroll College 2008-2012



Last Updated: December 2023