I am an Assistant Professor for Geographical Information Science at the GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography at Penn State. My research interests center on multidisciplinary topics at the interface between spatial cognition and GIScience, especially the area of geographic event conceptualization and the integration of cognitive factors into formal characterizations of dynamic spatial processes. A second line of my research at Penn State will be the interaction of people, environments, and mobile and static devices, i.e. location based services (LBS).
Before I came to Penn State I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the CRC for Spatial Information, Geomatics Department, and was a founder member of the Spatial Information Science Research Group, The University of Melbourne. I also spent time at the Geography Department and Cognitive Science Emphasis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I received my Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Bremen, co-authored the project MapSpace which is part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre for Spatial Cognition and worked in the AspectMap project (Spatial Cognition Priority Program, German Science Foundation). I started my Ph.D. studies in Hamburg at the Graduate Program for Cognitive Science.
News
04/2008 News update
- Paper accepted at GeoInformatica
- Title: Urban Granularities - A Data Structure for Cognitively Ergonomic Route Directions
- Co-authors: Stefan Hansen, Kai-Florian Richter, Stephan Winter
- Contribution (together with Dr. Frank Hardisty) accepted at Conference on Research and Training in Spatial Intelligence
- Title: Visual Analytics and the Geometry of Thought—Spatial Intelligence through Sapient Interfaces
- Conference Website
- Workshop proposal (together with Dr. Stephen Hirtle) on YAH-maps accepted at the Spatial Cognition Conference 2008
accepted
- Workshop Website
- Tutorial proposal on Behavioral Similarity Assesment accepted at the Spatial Cognition Conference 2008
- Penn State Coffee Hour Talk available at iTunes University
09/2007 Best paper award, COSIT 2007
08/2007 Article in GEOInformatics
07/2007 Funding through NURI
06/2007 Funding through WUN
05/2007 Paper accepted at COSIT
05/2007 Invited speaker/participant at the inaugural symposium for the Spatial Information Science Research Interest Group
04/2007 Paper accepted for the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions - Prepositions 2007
04/2007 Paper accepted for the International Journal of Geographical Information Science
02/2007 Invitation for plenary session speaker at the AAAI spring symposium.
02/2007 Paper: Embodying spatial maps is available for download.
01/2007 New affiliation details available.
12/2006 Report on Cognitive OpenLS specification and slides from a presentation at the OGC meeting at Tyson's Corner are available.
12/2006 New MapSpace Website online.
11/2006 Paper accepted at AAAI Spring Symposium on Control Mechanisms for Spatial Knowledge Processing in Cognitive / Intelligent Systems.
09/2006 Best Paper Award at Spatial Cognition Conference 2006