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

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 paper, 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, 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.