Background and Research
I have done pure research from 2008 to 2014 at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, from 2015 to 2018 for the Information Science Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and up to the present as an affiliate of Rutgers University. I have supervised undergraduates, graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow on research in areas of geo-data mining, geo-information retrieval and visualization, and design of systems to reduce visual mistakes. My PhD in information science came from Rutgers University, where I worked with Professor Michael Lesk in a dissertation pertaining to maps. My B.A. from Yale University is in medieval history and culture, my A.M. from Harvard University is in fine arts, and my M.S. from Simmons is in information science.
Getting lost on the way to an important meeting when I was in graduate school prompted me to devote my life to systems that would improve others’ sense of direction. My contributions to the field, and many of my publications, are in areas of geoparsing masses of text so as to make the locations clear, and creating outdoor and indoor maps to help people find their way.
I have won support for research projects from government agencies including DARPA, ARL/ARO, NSF and the NIH. I have managed dozens of geoinformatics and data-organization research projects, working with colleagues, and future colleagues of mostly computer science undergraduate and graduate students. Tools created as a result of some of these projects are noted in this website “Resources” section.
I have designed courses for Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon University in areas of geoinformatics and the curation and preservation of data. I care very much about oral and written presentation and I continue to influence colleagues and students on how to write simply and show slides to keep the audience’s attention. Also, I have also a short paper on this subject. I have co-chaired a conference and served on program committees. I have been a technical reviewer for journals and grants, a competition judge, and a website design consultant.