(Vision Paper) A Vision for Spatio-Causal Situation Awareness, Forecasting, and Planning

Fahim Tasneema Azad, K. Selçuk Candan, Ahmet Kapkiç, Mao-Lin Li, Huan Liu, Pratanu Mandal, Paras Sheth, Bilgehan Arslan, Gerardo Chowell-Puente, John Sabo, Rebecca Muenich, Javier Redondo Anton, Maria Luisa Sapino

Abstract: Successfully tackling many urgent challenges in socio-economically critical domains, such as public health and sustainability, requires a deeper understanding of causal relationships and interactions among a diverse spectrum of spatio-temporally distributed entities. In these applications, the ability to leverage spatio-temporal data to obtain causally based situational awareness and to develop informed forecasts to provide resilience at different scales is critical. While the promise of a causally grounded approach to these challenges is apparent, the core data technologies needed to achieve these are in the early stages and lack a framework to help realize their potential. In this article, we argue that there is an urgent need for a novel paradigm of spatio-causal research built on computational advances in spatio-temporal data and model integration, causal learning and discovery, large scale data- and model-driven simulations, emulations, and forecasting, as well as spatio-temporal data-driven and model-centric operational recommendations, and effective causally driven visualization and explanation. We thus provide a vision, and a road map, for spatio-causal situation awareness, forecasting, and planning.