■ Ms. Deirdre Bishop USA

• Geographic Operations Advisor, Geography Division,
• U.S. Census Bureau

■ Experiences:

As Geographic Operations Advisor in the Geography Division of the U.S. Census Bureau, Ms. Deirdre Bishop assists with the management of 300 federal employees and 100 contractors in 24 branches. She is currently planning for the 2020 Census and implementing the Geographic Support System Initiative, a $400 million program designed to enhance the Census Bureau’s future geographic operations. Ms. Bishop acts as a liaison to international and national organizations, federal agencies, and state and local governments.

Prior to her current position, Ms. Bishop was the Assistant Chief of the Census Bureau’s Redistricting Data Office. There she managed the five phases of the Census Redistricting Data Program and acted as a liaison to state government officials. Prior to her tenure in the Headquarters Office, she served as both Program Coordinator and Geographic Coordinator in the Census Bureau’s New York Regional Office.

■ Research Interests :

Improving the accuracy and completeness of national address lists and spatial databases by partnering with state and local governments.

■ Awards:

Twice awarded the Bronze Medal, the Census Bureau’s highest honor at the national level. 

■ Keynote Speech:

Topic: Integrating Spatial and Statistical Data at the U.S. Census Bureau
        Abstract:

The U.S. Census Bureau maintains the Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing System (MAF/TIGER System), the geographic and cartographic infrastructure used to support the decennial census and on-going surveys. The MAF/TIGER System integrates a national list of living quarters with a spatial database to allow for the accurate collection, tabulation, and dissemination of statistical data. This data determines the apportionment of the U.S. House of Representatives, affects the allocation of over 400 billion dollars of federal funds per year to local communities, and impacts policy and decision making at all levels of government.

While the mission of the Census Bureau has not changed from one decade to the next, the technology used to support census operations has changed drastically. This presentation will showcase the geographic processes and systems used to conduct the 2010 Census, various technologies used to display and disseminate spatial and statistical data, and plans for incorporating the use of new technology in preparation for the future.

■ Prof. Sung-Kyun Kim Korea

• Dept. of Landscape Architecture,
• College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,
• Seoul National University, Korea

■ Research Interests:

Community sustainability, Green energy and engineering societal transitions.

■ Experiences:

2007~ Present           Chairman of IFLA APR Cultural Landscape Committee
        2007~ Present           Korean Delegate of International Federation of Landscape
                                              Architects (IFLA)
        2009~ Present           Director of Urban Greening Institute, Seoul National University
        2009~ Present           Cultural Heritage Committee (Seoul Metropolitan City)
        2010~ Present           Environmentally Friendly Building Certification Committee for
                                              Korea Land & Housing Corporation
        2010~ Present           Seoul Metropolitan City Construction Technique Consultative
                                              Committee
        2011~ Present           Ministry of Defense Special Construction Technique
                                              Consultative Committee
        2011~ Present           Korea Public Procurement Service Design Evaluation
                                              Committee
        2011~ Present           Seoul Metropolitan City Architectural Committee
        2011~ 2012                President of Korean Society of Rural Planning

■ Research Interests:

Environmental Design & Cultural Landscape

■ Awards:

2010 The Merit Award, 2010 Seoul City Environmental Awards
        2010 The Merit Award (Landscape Planning), 2010 IFLA APR Awards for Landscape
        Architecture.

■ Main Publication:

Kim, Sung-Kyun et al. 2009. Walking in the World City Forests. Seoul: Iche.
        Kim, Sung-Kyun et al. 2009. History of Oriental Landscape Architectural Culture.
        Seoul:Daega.
        Kim, Sung-Kyun et al. 1997, Computer Application Techniques for Environmental
        Planning and Design. Seoul: Sungandang.
        Kim, Sung-Kyun. 1993. Computer Applied Landscape Design. Seoul: Kukje.

■ Keynote Speech:

Topic: Digital Cultural Landscape: past, present and future
        Abstract:
        A cultural landscape is the visual outcome of humans living in a particular area, the product of a continuous interaction between nature and human activity. It includes historical places, fields, buildings, and other cultural markers, together with the natural environment itself; by the impact of human habitation it has got cultural value as well.

 As history, the using of digital tools in the field of cultural landscape can be dated back to the early of 1970s, which associated with the proposition for a complete digitization of the surveying process and data mapping. At present, digital technology has largely applied into cultural landscape information system frameworks through the integrating of hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, integrating, and visualizing all forms of geographically referenced information. Moreover, these digital information is available to create elevation and 3D models, and share of data through network databases, or known as web-base.

 With the aids of digital tools, it helps us to make better decision in cultural landscape planning, such as cultural site selection, cultural route/corridor selection, cultural conservation, etc. In the field of cultural landscape, the role of citizens is very important to reach effective cultural resources preservation. Organizations are now able to supply the public with decision-making environments based around GIS across the Internet, enhancing the two-way flow of information between the public and those governing them, developing communities interested in particular problems and aiding the formation of a democratic consensus in problem areas. In the future, the vision of digital cultural landscape should be strengthened through improving the requirements it implied, such as access to computer processing cycles, broadband internet, interoperability of systems, and above all data organization, storage, and retrieval. The ongoing care and interpretation of cultural landscape through digital tools can improve our quality of life and deepens a sense of place and identity for future generations.

 Lastly, the recent idea of Digital Earth has a brilliant prospect in the realm of cultural landscape because of its various benefits, which included cost savings and increased efficiency in implementation, communication and recordkeeping. Digital Earth could become a platform of cultural landscape. More integration of Digital Earth concept with cultural landscape is imperative in order to create better and comprehensive environment for our Earth and culture.

■ Prof. Ming-Hsiang Tsou,
   Dept. Of Geography, San Diego State University.USA

■ Experiences:

Dr. Tsou is Professor in the Department of Geography, San Diego State University and served on the editorial boards of the Annals of GIS (2008-) and the Professional Geographers (2011-). He is co-author of the book, Internet GIS, published by Wiley in 2003, the co-chair of the NASA Earth Science Enterprise Data System Working Group (ESEDWG) Standard Process Group (SPG) from 2004 to 2007, the 2007-2008 Chair of the Cartographic Specialty Group, and the 2011-2012 Chair of the Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group in the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Tsou was appointed by the National Academy of Science in 2006 to serve on the committee on “Research Priorities for the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science”. In 2007, he created and maintained an interactive Web-based mapping services for San Diego Wildfires 2007 (http://map.sdsu.edu) and his efforts have been recognized by the AAG and the San Diego Union Tribune (newspaper). In 2008, Tsou served as a senior researcher in the NSF-funded GeoTech Center ( http://www.geotechcenter.org/) for promoting GIS education in community colleges. In 2010, Tsou served as the Principle Investigator (PI) of the NSF-CDI project," Mapping ideas from Cyberspace to Realspace", funded by National Science Foundation. This NSF project integrates geographic information systems, computational linguistics, web search engines, and social media to track and analyze public-accessible websites and tweets in cyberspace.

■ Research Interests :

Mapping Cyberspace, Web GIS applications, Internet mapping, Mobile GIS, and Cyberinfrastructure with grid computing and cloud computing.

■ Awards:

2011 The San Diego State University Senate Excellence in Teaching
         Award (the College Awardee).
        2010 National Science Foundation: the Cyber-Enabled Discovery and
        Innovation program (CDI) Award ($1.3 million, 2010 – 2014).
        (“Mapping ideas from Cyberspace to Realspace", CDI-Type II
       Award # 1028177. http://mappingideas.sdsu.edu/).

■ Keynote Speech:

Topic: "Mapping Social Media and Diffusion of Innovations on Digital Earth:
                     Revealing the Invisible World”
        Abstract:

By using smart phones, mobile devices, and the Internet, social media and weblogs allow people to communicate, express, and coordinate their activities dynamically and geospatially, and to a significant degree, to accomplish these social functions in near real time. The impacts of these tools were so vividly demonstrated in the most recent anti-government protests in the Middle East (the Arab Spring), Occupy Wall Streets, and the London riots. In order to cope with these new trends, the next generation of Digital Earth should focus more on the analysis of social networks and social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, and on-line forums), and their impacts on our society.

Cyberspace (the invisible world), a powerful platform for collective thinking and idea exchange, provides valuable intelligence to help scientists monitoring social processes and events ranging in diversity from the spread of infectious diseases, to radical social movements, to the structure of terrorist networks. Mapping the information diffusion and cluster patterns in response to various social movements, events, and epidemics can facilitate the study of innovation diffusion. The diffusion of innovations is a dynamic process whereby new concepts, ideas, and technologies spread through our society on the Digital Earth and social networks.

This presentation will introduce a new research method, called the Spatial Web Automatic Reasoning and Mapping System (SWARMS) (http://mappingideas.sdsu.edu). SWARM is designed to track spatial patterns of publically-accessible web pages and social media (Twitter) based upon searching predefined clusters of keywords determined by domain experts. Web pages and tweets associated with the same keywords were converted into visualization maps using GIS functions. Given the extent to which the human population is “plugged into” the online world, this new approach may illustrate a new research direction for scientists to study human thoughts, behaviors, disease outbreaks, global web contents, and new communication theories.