Barnali Dixon

Dr. Barnali Dixon is a Professor at School of Geosciences and contribute to Geography and Environmental Science and Policy programs. Dr. Barnali Dixon is the Director of the Geospatial Analytics Lab (G-SAL) and also the Executive Director and PI for the Initiative on Coastal Adaptation and Resilience (iCAR) at USF. Her research focuses on the development and application of Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) integrated with Geospatial Technologies and geocomputation for modeling and managing land-water interfaces in the context of extreme weather events and climate change (including sea level rise) to facilitate informed data-driven planning, adaptation and resilience efforts with a particular emphasis equitable resilience. She is interested in making the ‘smart city framework’ smarter by using a holistic approach that facilitates intentional inclusivity of direct and indirect engagement of citizens to develop customized solutions. Her recently completed project funded by AT&T included the development of an integrated Community Resiliency Information System (CRIS). Her current NSF-funded project is called ‘Design and Development of a Near Real-Time Community Crowdsourced Resilience Information System for Enhancing Community Resilience in the Face of Flooding and other Extreme Events’. She is particularly interested in the development of transdisciplinary and spatially explicit models using Artificial Intelligence tools (AI) such as fuzzy logic, Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Machine, Relevance Vector Machine, Random Forest and other machine learning algorithms and soft computing techniques. She is considered one of the leaders in the subfield of geocomputation, where geospatial technologies intersect with machine learning and soft computing tools. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Specialist Award.