In addition to conducting its own research, CURA partners with departments, schools, and colleges across Ohio State and with individuals and organizations in the community. CURA participates in the development of proposals to secure grant funding, collaborates on new research or projects with outside organizations, and contributes technical expertise to existing initiatives. The Center is particularly focused on projects related to urban development and policy, public health, environment and society, and GIS and mapping.
If you are interested in collaborating with CURA, please complete the form below. A representative from CURA will reach out to discuss your project and come up with a potential scope of work, budget, and timeline.
More details about CURA’s expertise and resources can be found below.
Expertise
CURA specializes in:
- Geospatial Data Integration
- Geospatial Analytics
- Urban Data Analytics
- Mobility Analytics
- Community Engaged Research
- Customized Tool and Application Development
- Digitization and Georeferencing
- Geocoding
- Geospatial Network Analysis
- GIS Customization and Automation
- Mapping
Facilities & Resources
CURA has extensive computing facilities which are optimized for geospatial analysis. The flagship of our computing infrastructure consists of three physical servers which are housed at the State of Ohio Datacenter. Each of these servers is provisioned with 756GB RAM, 28 processor cores, a Tesla P100 12GB graphics processing unit, and 120TB of disk storage.
To handle cases where CURA’s standard infrastructure cannot accommodate a project due to special requirements, CURA maintains a close relationship with the College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services (ASCTech). With the help of ASCTech, CURA staff can provision application-specific virtual machines. This allows for nearly unlimited on-demand customization of our computing infrastructure. In addition to the centralized infrastructure already described, CURA manages nine high-performance workstations that are available for analysts and developers to use for project work, including a specialized workstation with 40 processor cores and 64GB RAM. All of our workstations are equipped with the latest Esri ArcGIS products and a suite of other commercial and open source GIS software.
Graduate students, undergraduate students and staff at CURA promote the use of emerging data resources and methodological approaches in geo-visualization and spatial analysis. The Center works to facilitate affiliates’ access to high performance computing environments, both internal and external. Additionally, CURA provides consultation on the design and optimal access of complex, interdisciplinary data sources often characterized by multilevel and multi-modal structures – including access schemes involving multi-site/multi-user arrangements.