The Geography Colloquium Series, Spring 2008

presents jointly with the IGERT Program in GI Science :

 

Alexander Klippel

Assistant Professor,

Geographical Information Science,

GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography,

Penn State University

“Sapient Interfaces to Spatio-Temporal Information”

 

Friday, April 25, 2008

3:15 p.m.

Fillmore 170

 

How is it that we humans make sense of all the dynamic events and processes that we encounter during our daily lives and in the world around us?  Understanding how such events are conceptualized and organized at the cognitive level is important because any computational systems built to represent such events needs to provide user interfaces that reflect our human understanding, or else risk being difficult or impossible for humans to use effectively.  But what are the organizing cognitive principles, and are they consistent between people?  Our research on sapient interfaces seeks to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative perspectives on spatio-temporal information to advance the development of intuitive geographic information systems and interfaces. To achieve this goal, artificial intelligence based formalisms-characterizing qualitative spatial knowledge-in GIScience have been evaluated in behavioral studies. The goal of these evaluations was to determine where qualitative formalisms do indeed capture human cognitive processes, and where they fall short in delivering the promise of modeling commonsense spatial knowledge. The GIScience community is in need of a research methodology and efficient software tools for behavioral studies that would allow for evaluating the abundance of proposed spatio-temporal formalisms regarding their claimed suitability for reflecting commonsense reasoning. Our current research advances methodologies, especially similarity measures, to asses these formalisms regarding their potential for intuitive (sapient)  interfaces. 

Alexander Klippel is an Assistant Professor for Geographical Information Science at the GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography at Penn State. His 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.  Alex received his Ph.D. from the Spatial Cognition Program in Germany (Informatics, Bremen) and also holds a masters degree in Geography (Trier, Germany).  He worked as a postdoctoral research associate at UC Santa Barbara and  the University of Melbourne (Australia).

There will be a Reception with Pizza & Wings in the hallway outside Wilkeson 108 in the Geography Department following the presentation.