Chris Brunsdon and Martin Charlton attended the International Summer School on Spatial Structures and Dynamics, held at the Villa Finaly, Florence 14th-19th July 2014. Participants included 18 instructors together with 36 postgraduates and early career researchers. Chris presented the opening plenary, on Geocomputation and Social Science during the morning of Monday 14th July. In the afternoons of Monday and Tuesday we ran tutorials on Spatial Statistics to a smaller group of 18 students in each session. During each 3 hour tutorial the students were introduced to geographically weighted summary statistics, and geographically weighed regression, with an extensive practical based around GW summary statistics. The latest version of GWmodel and R was used for this, running on Mac and Windows laptops.

Participants in Monday afternoon’s tutorial

Participants in Tuesday afternoon’s tutorial

Chris presenting at the plenary on Monday morning.

The Summer school was organised by Arnoud Banos of the Laboratoire d’Excellence Dynamiques Territoriales et Spatiales (LabEx DynamiTe) which is part of the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne. There are some web pages about the workshop here; as well as some general information, there are photographs, videos, and some of the various presentations.

The Villa Finaly is a remarkable institution; originally built in the early 15th century, it was left to the Université de Paris in 1953 by the then owners, the Landau-Finaly family. In the 1990s the 13 Universities which now compose the Université de Paris, as common owners, decided to restore the building to something of its original splendour. More detail about the Villa is available.