Speaker Biographies
Luc Anselin
Luc Anselin is professor of geography and director of the Spatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and holds joint appointments in urban and regional planning, agricultural and consumer economics, economics and political science. His research deals with the development, implementation and application of methods for spatial data analysis. He has published some 120 articles and is the author or co-editor of eight books and monographs. He is also the developer of the SpaceStat and GeoDa software packages.
Andrew A. Beveridge
Andrew A. Beveridge, Ph.D., is professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, and chair of the Queens College Sociology Department. He is engaged in several projects, one tracking long-term urban change and others assessing neighborhood effects in education, drug use and crime. Since 1993, Beveridge has been a consultant to The New York Times, which has published a series of news reports and maps based upon his analysis of Census data. He writes the demographic topic column for the Gotham Gazette, an online publication of the Citizens Union. He and his team have developed an interactive application and Web-based set of maps entitled Social Explorer that allow the user to compare and contrast demography based upon an area that he or she selects and view it over time. Aside from his published work, he has demographic-based GIS techniques in numerous consulting engagements with an array of clients, including several involving civil rights litigation. For more information, see http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/aboutus/Andy.asp.
David Bodenhamer
David J. Bodenhamer is a professor of history and (founding) executive director of The Polis Center, a multidisciplinary research unit of 25 full-time staff members at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is author or editor of eight books and over 25 journal articles and book chapters, including an essay, "GIS and History: Implications for the Discipline," for the forthcoming volume, "Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship" (Knowles and Hillier, eds, ESRI Press).
Vernon Burton
Vernon Burton is the founding director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (CHASS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Professor of history and sociology. He is also a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he is associate director for humanities and social sciences. Burton is the author of more than 100 articles and the author or editor of 11 books. His research and teaching interests include the American South, especially race relations, family, community, politics, religion, and the intersection of humanities and social sciences, especially humanities computing.
Wendy Cho
Wendy K. Tam Cho is an associate professor of political science and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis, among others. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program), the CIRCLE/Pew Charitable Trusts, and the University of Illinois Research Board. Her work at NCSA focuses on computational solutions and approaches to traditional social science problems, such as redistricting and decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty.
Noshir Contractor
Noshir Contractor is a professor of speech communication, psychology, and library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and is co-director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the University's Center for Advanced Study.
Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communication. His book 'Theories of Communication Networks" (co-authored with Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press in English and scheduled to be published by China Renmin University Press in simplified Chinese in 2007) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web) and its cyberinfrastructure extension, CI-KNOW, a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.
Barbara Entwistle
Barbara Entwisle is a social demographer interested in population dynamics and demographic responses to social change. She is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, director of the Carolina Population Center, and president-elect of the Population Association of America. For more information, see http://www.cpc.unc.edu/bios/index.php?person=entwisle.
Kevin Franklin
Kevin Franklin is executive director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and a former deputy director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He serves as co-chair for the Humanities, Arts and Social Science Research Group for the Global Grid Forum and is a member of the UC Humanities, Arts and Social Science Technology Council and the Worldwide University Network Grid Advisory Committee. Franklin coordinates UCHRI research and development activities at the interface of the humanities, arts, science and technology.
Michael Goodchild
Michael F. Goodchild is a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara; chair of the executive committee, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); associate director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and director of NCGIA's Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He has published 14 books and is the author of some 350 scientific papers. His current research interests center on geographic information science, spatial analysis, and uncertainty in geographic data. For more information, see http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~good/.
Elena Irwin
Elena Irwin is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Her research interests include spatial models of rural-to-urban land use change, urban sprawl, household location decisions, and interactions between human and ecological systems. She is a co-investigator of an interdisciplinary research project on coupled natural-human interactions that seeks to understand how local economies and regional patterns of land use change interact with large lake ecosystems. She is also co-director of the Exurban Change Project at the Ohio State University and teaches a class on the economics of growth and sprawl. For more information, see http://aede.osu.edu/people/display2.php?user=irwin.78.
Ruth Mostern
Ruth Mostern is an assistant professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced. A historian by training, she is interested in the relationship between geography and political authority. She is completing revisions for a book entitled "Apprehending the Realm: Territory and State Power in Song China, 960-1276 CE." From 1999-2004 she was on the staff of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, where she worked on the development and publication of Cultural Atlases, conducted research on digital gazetteers for historical and cultural data, and organized conferences and other activities for affiliates of the ECAI community. For more information, see http://www.ucmerced.edu/faculty/facultybio.asp?facultyid=34.
Jim Myers
Jim Myers received his BA in physics from Cornell University in 1985 and his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), he oversees initiatives in cyberenvironments and technologies. Myers is the lead architect for the Mid-America Earthquake Center's MAEViz hazard risk management collaboratory, co-lead of NCSA's Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstration project, a member of the Network for Earthquake Engineering and Simulation board of directors, and an advisor on cyberinfrastructure for the NEON and CLEANER environmental observatories. He is also the lead investigator on the U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Scientific Annotation Middleware project (scientific content management, semantic annotation, and records functionality) and is serving as the chief technical officer for the Department of Energy-sponsored Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science project.
Marc Snir
Marc Snir is Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science and head of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He pursues research on parallel programming languages and environments, parallel programming patterns, and performance tuning patterns. He is involved in the Department of Energy-funded Center for Programming Models for Scalable Parallel Computing.
Until August 2001 he was a senior manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center where he initiated and led the IBM Blue Gene project. Previously, he led the Scalable Parallel Systems research group and was responsible for major contributions to the IBM SP scalable parallel system: architecture, parallel operating environment, message-passing libraries, tools, parallel file system, parallel algorithms and applications.
Snir received a PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979, worked at NYU on the NYU Ultracomputer project in 1980-1982, and worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982-1986, before joining IBM. Snir was a major contributor to the design of the Message Passing Interface. He has published numerous papers and given many presentations on computational complexity, parallel algorithms, parallel architectures, interconnection networks, parallel system software and parallel programming environments.
Snir is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He is on the Computer Research Association Board of Directors and is on the National Science Foundation CISE advisory committee. He is on the editorial board of Parallel Processing Letters and ACM Computing Surveys. He has Erdos number 2 and is a mathematical descendent of Jacques Hadamard.
George Tita
George Tita is a member of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD from the H.J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. Tita also spent two years working as an associate policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. His research spans the causes, correlates, and costs of violence, with a particular focus on the social processes responsible for the diffusion and spread of violence across geography, as well as across groups. For more information, see http://www.seweb.uci.edu/faculty/tita/.
Robert Townsend
Robert Townsend is the University of Chicago's Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College. His contributions to theory include the revelation principle, costly state verification, optimal multi-period contracts, decentralization with private information, money with spatially separated agents, financial structure and growth, and forecasting the forecasts of others. The Econometric Society, to which he is an elected fellow, awarded him the Frisch Medal in 1998 for his paper "Risk and Insurance in Village India." He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was honored by being named the 2005 keynote speaker for the Yale Economic Growth Center's prestigious Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture Series.
As a consultant, Townsend has advised the governments of Mexico and Bolivia as well as such influential international institutions as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. At the World Bank, Townsend has made a significant contribution to the understanding of the financial crisis and recovery in Thailand. Among his other activities as a consultant there; he has investigated whether factor prices in South Africa matter in agricultural production and in the selection of production technology; he has worked as Agricultural Services Programme Task Team Leader with the Tanzanian Public Expenditure Review; and, most recently, he helped assess a rainfall insurance scheme implemented in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. Townsend has applied findings from Thailand about the relationship between poverty and financial markets to Nicaragua and Peru in his role as a consultant at the Inter-Development Bank.
He has worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Comptroller of the Currency. At the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for more than 10 years, Townsend has studied the role of banks in disadvantaged communities, the liquidity constraints of small businesses in ethnic enclaves, and the difference between limited commitment and moral hazard in the borrowing patterns of people of varying wealth. In his role as a consultant to the Comptroller of the Currency, Townsend has spoken on worth to the poor of low-cost, low-minimum-balance, low-fee deposit accounts.
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