Geographical Design

Dr Stephen C. Hirtle is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint appointment in the Intelligent Systems Program. He directs the Spatial Information Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducts research on the structure of cognitive maps, navigation in real and virtual spaces, and computational models for spatial cognition. Dr. Hirtle was the founding co-editor of Spatial Cognition and Computation and past-president of the Classification Society of North America. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal Geographical Information Science. In addition, Dr. Hirtle has had visiting appointments in Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, Computer Science at Molde College in Norway, the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and Geoinformatics at the University of Augsburg in Germany. He hosted the first North American meeting of International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'97), in the Laurel Highlands, outside of Pittsburgh, PA, in October of 1997 and co-chaired the NCGIA Varenius Panel on "Cognitive Models of Dynamic Phenomena and Their Representations" in October of 1998 with Alan MacEachren. He has also served on the Board of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.

John M. Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, and was a founder of human-computer interaction. He served on the program committee of the 1982 Bureau of Standards Conference on the Human Factors of Computing Systems that in effect inaugurated the field and was the direct predecessor of the field's flagship conference series, the ACM CHI Conferences. Through the past two decades, Carroll has been a leader in the development of the field of Human-Computer Interaction. In 1984 he founded the User Interface Institute at the IBM Thomas J.Watson Research Center, the most influential corporate research laboratory during the latter 1980s. In the 1994, he joined Virginia Tech as Department Head of Computer Science where in 1995 he led the effort to form the university's Center for Human-Computer Interaction. That year, Virginia Tech was invited to join the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium, a group of the leading corporate and academic HCI research organizations in the world.He has written more than 250 technical papers, more than 25 conference plenary addresses, and 13 books, including HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks, and Usability Engineering (with Mary Beth Rosson). He serves on 10 editorial boards for journals and handbooks, and is the current editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Computer- Human Interaction (ToCHI). He has won the Rigo Career Achievement Award from ACM (SIGDOC), received the Silver Core Award from IFIP, and is a member of the CHI Academy. In 2003 he became the fifth recipient of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award, the most prestigious research award in HCI.