The Quark Lab

A deep intellectual curiosity drives our lab to explore how emerging technologies—especially location analytics, GeoAI, and machine learning—can solve real-world problems. It’s a place where creativity meets rigor, and we pursue questions that excite us while mentoring graduate students eager to push the limits of research and innovation. We do all this with passion, collaboration, and a healthy dose of fun along the way. 

The lab benefits from members' backgrounds in Experimental Particle Physics, Computer Science, Information Systems, and Geography, where the focus is always on precision and solving complex challenges. This experience gives our work a solid technical foundation to blend our technical expertise to make a real-world impact. This combination enables us to develop innovative research methods that advance science and provide practical solutions to pressing issues.

At our lab, we bring together GeoAI, machine learning, digital twins, spatial analytics, and agentic AI to address complex real-world challenges across communities, government, business, public safety, healthcare, and education. Our research integrates geographic, socioeconomic, environmental, organizational, and digital data to reveal patterns, anticipate risks, and support more informed decisions. We work closely with academic, government, community, and industry partners to ensure that our solutions are practical, explainable, ethically designed, and responsive to the needs of the people and organizations they serve. Our major projects include:

Homelessness: We integrate housing, economic, health, and geographic data to identify communities at elevated risk and support earlier, more equitable interventions.

Gun Violence: In collaboration with Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis, we combine neighborhood conditions, spatial risk factors, and social media signals to study emerging patterns of violence.

Community Risk and Resilience: We develop digital twins that allow communities to assess vulnerabilities, explore future scenarios, and compare potential policy interventions.

Aging and Community Resilience: We examine how access to healthcare, transportation, housing, social isolation, and neighborhood conditions affect the well-being of older adults.

Geo-Medicine: We study how pollution, extreme heat, green space, neighborhood safety, transportation, and healthcare access influence physical and mental health outcomes.

Unauthorized Drone Risk: In partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Irregular Warfare Center, we use satellite imagery, terrain analysis, and open-source intelligence to identify airspace vulnerabilities along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Public-Safety Decision Support: We are developing governance-aware agentic AI to help law-enforcement professionals synthesize reports, spatial data, and contextual evidence while maintaining privacy, explainability, and human oversight.

Economic Development: We are creating an agentic decision-support platform that helps cities evaluate economic conditions, identify target industries, compare peer communities, and prioritize development strategies.

Africa Skills Observatory: We analyze labor-market trends, employer needs, education, and workforce data to identify skills gaps and emerging opportunities across African economies.

Executive and Board Decision Support: We are developing an AI framework that monitors economic, regulatory, geopolitical, workforce, and operational risks and converts them into concise, evidence-based executive briefings. 

AI-Enabled Education: We design experiential learning approaches that help students use AI and analytics responsibly, evaluate uncertainty and bias, and communicate data-driven recommendations. 

Across these projects, our mission is to transform complex and fragmented data into responsible, explainable, and actionable insights. We believe AI should not replace human judgment but strengthen it by helping decision-makers understand risks, compare alternatives, anticipate emerging challenges, and allocate resources more effectively. Whether we are working with vulnerable communities, public agencies, business leaders, educators, or national security partners, we emphasize transparency, accountability, ethical data use, and measurable, real-world impact. Ultimately, our goal is to develop technology that improves decisions, strengthens communities and organizations, and creates meaningful benefits for people.