University of New Brunswick

Faculty Member, Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering

About

ACADEMIC CARREER
After receiving a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Edinburgh in 1995, she worked on spatio-temporal modelling for ubiquitous computing at the University of Cambridge, Computer Sciences Department in England, for two years. She then took a research fellow position at the Pennsylvania State University before joining the Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in 1999. She was a visiting Professor in the LatinGeo Group at the Technical University of Madrid, Spain. She is currently Adjunct Professor at the University of New Brunswick and the European Editor of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science edited by Taylor & Francis.

For the last decade, she has been working on policy, research and educational issues at European and national levels, aiming to address the needs in sustainable mobility and environmental management. Working in international funded research projects has provided her with the experience of operating in multidisciplinary teams from government, industry, and international organisations. In addition, one of her most rewarding experiences has been in teaching students from different cultural backgrounds and nationalities

RESEARCH PRIORITY
- Develop the theory, methods and technologies for exploring the nature of movement in complex networks that emerge from the interaction of social, economical and environmental systems.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Investigate some of the major theories on behaviour that are pertinent to the development of effective space-time representations about collective movement. Considerable attention has been given in literature to models of individual behaviour – but much less attention has been given to models or theories that attempt to understand movement behaviour within groups, organisations and whole communities.

- Develop a new approach to study collective movement behaviour through the simulation of social, economical and environmental systems. These systems are extremely complex, and they usually develop into scale-free structures. My central point of investigation within complexity research is the development of a knowledge structure where relationships between movement, socio-cultural organisation and geographical space can affect the probability of linking all components of a scale-free complex network. Some recent developments include: agent based modelling, context based representation and reasoning, data mining, neural networks, descriptive logics, Bayesian networks, affective cartography, and visual analytics.

- Look into cutting edge advances in Information and Communication Technology such as the application of mobile sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, historical GIS and spatial data infrastructures. The main application domains of interest are social networks, environmental monitoring, disaster management, spatial planning and sustainable mobility.


CURRRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

SOCONET (Understanding social networks within complex, nonlinear systems: geographically-integrated history and dynamics GIS) is a multidisciplinary, multinational research project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), 2010-2014.

MODAP (Mobility, Data Mining, and Privacy) is a Coordination Action type project funded by EU, FET OPEN, 2009-2012 (http://www.modap.org/).

MOVE (Knowledge Discovery from Moving Objects) is a COST Action type project funded by EU, COST, ICT, 2009-2013 (http://www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/IC0903-Knowledge-Discovery-from-Moving-Objects-MOVE-End-date-October-2013).