Registration | Themes | Participants | Background | Contact

Tim Loesch

MGIS

My interests include hydrologic research, high resolution elevation data, data visualization, delivery and enterprise integration

Steven Manson

Department of Geography, CLA

Combining environmental research, social science approaches, and geographic information science to understand changing urban and rural landscapes in the United States and Mexico.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~manson/email

Stacey Stark

Geographic Information Sciences Laboratory, CLA, Duluth Campus

I use a broad range of GIS skills including project management, programming, method development, computer software maintenance, writing and teaching. As Director of GISL I facilitate the implementation of program, equipment and system resources for the growing GISL. My areas of research are very applied and varied based on faculty and community needs. In 2008 my major projects included a Rural Pharmacies at Risk study, Mapping Wind Resource Data on the North Shore, and Alternative Transportation Planning for St Louis County School District. I am interested in applied research that will address our regions needs for regional sustainability.

http://www.d.umn.edu/~slstark/email

Rob Edsall

Geography, CLA

My primary research interest in visualization and its links to cartography. I see these links taking on several dimensions: 1. applications of cartographic design theory to visualization of non-spatial data (information visualization), 2. use of maps and interactive georepresentations to facilitate decision-making, 3. effective interface design and human-computer interaction, 4. incorporation of artistic and aesthetic design principles to make communication and exploration of data engaging and creative. Some specific areas of research that I have worked in (or plan to): representation and usability of uncertainty; maps' impact on society and vice versa; maps and rhetoric; application of music theory concepts to data representation (a.k.a. sonification); multivariate and spatiotemporal phenomena and their representation.

Randall Johnson

MetroGIS

1. Defining organizational/governance/funding models capable of sustaining cross-sector collaboration to address shared geospatial needs (Spatial Data Infrastructures). 2) Defining performance measurement metrics useful to document the public value created by successful Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), in particular, at the regional level.

Mohamed F. Mokbel

Computer Science

Location-based services Spatio-temporal databases Query processing and indexing of spatial data

www.cs.umn.edu/~mokbel

Mike Dolbow

Minnesota Department of Agriculture

Mike Dolbow is the GIS Coordinator for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA), where he provides leadership in the design and development of enterprise geospatial solutions. His team supports a wide variety of business functions and GIS users throughout MDA, including diverse programs such as Minnesota Grown and Gypsy Moth Trapping. Mike holds a Bachelor’s degree in Forestry from the University of New Hampshire, and has worked with geospatial technologies for over ten years. Before joining the Department of Agriculture in 2005, Mike was a GIS Specialist at the Metropolitan Council for five years. Mike’s interests in Geospatial Sciences are broad, from assessing environmental impacts of human activities to maximizing the efficiency of transportation networks. He is keenly aware of the scarcity of personnel with interdisciplinary experience, and finds team members to be most valuable when they can combine GIS knowledge with skills in traditional IT roles such as programming and database design. He also is a passionate supporter of integrating sound public policy with technology investments, which he pursues through participation in the Governor’s Council on Geographic Information.

http://www.gis.state.mn.us/Members/2009/09_dolbow.html

Michael Goodchild

Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara

Research on ontology and representation, uncertainty, spatial analysis; teaching to undergraduates and graduate students

www.geog.ucsb.edu/~good

Mark Kotz

Metropolitan Council

I have been heavily involved with defining strategies and methods to collaborate with the development and use of geospatial data in Minnesota, predominantly, but not exclusively among government entities. Most of this work has been done under the auspices of MetroGIS, a regional geospatial technology sharing collaborative. Work has includes standards and guidelines for geospatial data development, data transfer and documentation (metadata) as well as online mechanism for data discovery and delivery. It has also involved efforts to collaboratively define and agree upon priorities for commonly needed geospatial datasets among a diverse group of stakeholders. More recently my efforts are moving toward two newer areas that are natural progressions from earlier work. One involves understanding and articulating the needs for and benefits of collaborative data development among many authoritative sources. An example of this would be having 100 cities each develop and maintain its portion of a regional address points dataset. The second area involves collaborations with respect to defining, building and using geospatial applications and web services. This involves defining common needs as well as resolving issues of reliability and trust.

http://www.metrogis.org/teams/workgroups/shared_app/index.shtml

Laura Musacchio

Landscape Architecture I am interested in the phenomena of re-greening cities and bioregions and how geospatial technology can be used to enhance this process with communities.

http://landarch.design.umn.edu/people/musacchio.php

John Hourdos

Civil Engineering - Minnesota Traffic Observatory

Transportation GIS for network analysis, measurement storage and mining, integrated representation of spatial and temporal information with the ability to query on both levels. Currently working on data mining of vehicle GPS trajectories and network modeling for estimating accessibility.

http://www.mto.umn.edu

John Bryson

Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs

Organizational and governance issues related to making GIS information available to policy makers and end-users.

http://www.hhh.umn.edu/people/jmbryson/index.html

Joe Knight

Forest Resources

My research focuses on using geospatial information science such as remote sensing, image processing, geographic information systems (GIS), and the global positioning system (GPS) in applications such as: Identifying and characterizing natural and anthropogenic landscape change to assess impacts on water quality and urban, forest, and agricultural lands; describing landscape-human interactions that lead to exposure to infectious diseases; wetlands mapping and characterization; and thematic accuracy assessment methods development.

http://www.forestry.umn.edu/people/facstaff/knight/index.html

Francis Harvey

Geography, CLA

How data is used in organizations and how practical problems of integration are overcome are broad interests for research in GIScience.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~fharvey/index.html

David Mulla

Soil, Water & Climate

I am interested in spatial relationships and interactions between soils, landscapes and water resources. My current research focuses on using GIS, terrain analysis and watershed modeling to identify critical landscapes that contribute disproportionately to water pollution and develop alternative management practices to improve water quality. I am also interested in identifying sources of surface and ground water pollution using a combination of field experimentation, GIS analysis and process based modeling. Also, our group is using GIS and terrain analysis to estimate sediment contributions from ravines, bluffs and upland agricultural areas. Finally, I am using remote sensing and GIS to evaluate various strategies for precision management of fertilizer on Minnesota farms and fields.

http://info.soils.umn.edu/prof_site/dmulla/index.php

Bob Frazier

Independent

Computer researcher interested in GIS

Shashi Shekhar

Computer Science and Engineering

My research interests focus on spatial data mining and spatial databases, interdisciplinary areas at the intersection of Computer Science and Geographic Information Science (GIS). A major goal is to understand the computational structure of very large spatial computations (e.g. data analysis via spatial querying and spatial data mining) needed by social and physical sciences as well as engineering disciplines. Earlier our research investigated core technologies behind in-vehicle navigation devices as well as web-based routing services for outdoor navigation in urban environment. Recent research efforts explored evacuation route planning for homeland security in collaboration with the Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) and MnDOT. <p> My general area of research is data and knowledge engineering, with a focus on storage, management and analysis of scientific and geographic data, information and knowledge. Major efforts in data engineering and database systems, includes the Connectivity-Clustered Access Method (CCAM), a new storage and access method for spatial networks, which outperform traditional indexes (e.g. R-tree family) in carrying out network computations. Other projects relate to with semantic query optimization and high performance geographic databases. In knowledge engineering, work focuses on spatial data mining, and neural networks. Examples include the notion of co-location patterns in spatial datasets, characterization of the computational structure of spatial outlier detection, faster algorithms for estimating parameters for the spatial auto-regression model, as well one of the most scalable parallel formulation of the back-propagation learning algorithms for neural networks.

http://www.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar

Kristi Jensen

John R. Borchert Map Library

I am interested in finding out how best the libraries can support GIS on campus (and more broadly) by focusing on efforts to acquire, manage and preserve geospatial data. In addition to the acquisition of commercially available data products, we are interested in exploring the need to identify and preserve unique and/or re-usable faculty and student data or projects.

http://map.lib.umn.edu/

Amy West

Social Sciences and Professional Programs

I'm the University Libraries' Data Services Librarian. My interests are in supporting GIS activities on campus

http://www.lib.umn.edu/data/

Steve Graham

GIS Lab

I am interested in working with emerging technology and methods in a wide variety of areas. I have particualr interest in hydrology and environmental applications. I have interestes in scripting and programming and customization of the software and automating tasks. I also am interested in web development and dissemination of information.

http://www.d.umn.edu/claweb/gisl/main/index.php

Victoria Interrante

Computer Science and Engineering

My research expertise is primarily in visualization, virtual environments and computer graphics, with an emphasis on issues of perception and design. My group has done some work in geographic information visualization, involving human subjects experiments that collect quantitative data about how effectively people can read multivariate information from maps created using different algorithms for multivariate data display. In my immersive virtual environments research I have been primarily exploring issues related to 3D spatial perception and representation, including things like investigating how different modes of display and interaction affect people's ability to interpret and understand what they see.

http://www/cs.umn.edu/~interran/full_pub_list.html

Sudipto Banerjee

Biostatistics, School of Public Health

I work in developing statistical models and analysis techniques for spatially referenced datasets obtained using GIS/GIScience. My key interest lies in better estimating spatial associations and correlations using hierarchical (or multilevel) models. I primarily work with data sets from public health, the environmental and natural sciences. Currently my research focuses on estimating models from large spatial data sets containing several spatial variables and carrying out interpolation and prediction thereafter.

http://www.biostat.umn.edu/~sudiptob

Anne Pusey

Ecology, Evolution and Behavior

I study the ecology and ranging behavior of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park, Tanzania

http://www.cbs.umn.edu/eeb/faculty/PuseyAnne/

Judy Garrard

School of Public Health

Research in pharmacoepidemiology of psychotropic drug use by elderly in different Census tracts

http://www.hpm.umn.edu/people/regular/garrard/Garrard.htm

Vipin Kumar

Computer Science and Engineering

We have an ongoing collaboration with NASA on the application of data mining to the task of finding interesting patterns in earth science data derived from global observing satellites, terrestrial observations, and ecosystem models. We have studied applications of spatio-temporal data mining for detecting climate indices (teleconnections), to discover history of natural disasters such as massive fires, to detect changes land cover (e.g., global forest cover)

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kumar/

Loren Terveen

Computer Science & Engineering

Citizen-contributed knowledge. Geographic wikis

www.cs.umn.edu/~terveen

Paul Morin

Department of Geology and Geophysics

I am responsible for mapping Antarctica for the National Science Foundation. I also do geospatial visualization with the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

http://www.agic.umn.edu

J. Kevin Byrne

I am completing a graduate certificate in Geovisualization and Geographic Information Science (GIS) at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. While on sabbatical recently I lectured in abroad on "green geovisualization"; an animation titled "Global Water Tour" I did using virtual-globe software in my St. Mary’s coursework was featured at the August 2008 the plenary technology session of the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. I recently pledged to mentors to complete a capstone project in 2009 that uses "green GIS" principles and virtual-globe "mash-ups" to explore curbside recycling in order to geovisualize demographic patterns at the neighborhood scale.

email me for a pdf

Amy Hribar

Magrath Library

I'm interested in learning how, as a librarian, I might support GIS endeavors on the St. Paul campus.

Scott Zeimetz

Independent GIS Researcher 1 - Socio-economic trends - currently working on a project which highlights commercial vacancies and absorption rates throughout the nation. The application is real time and connects field analysts knowledge directly to the decision makers/owners. 2 - Renewable Energies - currently employed as analyst. Key issues - #1 is data availability due to the rural environment where most of these projects are taking place.

May Yuan

Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, University of Oklahoma

Temporal GIS and geographic dynamics

http://ags.ou.edu/~myuan

Jake Galzki

Dept. of Soil, Water, & Climate

I'm currently using terrain attributes in attempt to locate critical areas on the landscape that could benefit from agricultural BMPs for water quality protection. Our study areas are located in the Le Sueur Watershed near Mankato, MN.