Alex Klippel

Alex Klippel ...



..... directs the Human Factors Lab and 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. A second line of his research at Penn State is the interaction of people, environments, and mobile and static devices, i.e. location based services (LBS).
Before Alex came to Penn State he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the CRC for Spatial Information, Geomatics Department, and was a founder member of the Spatial Information Science Research Group, The University of Melbourne. He also spent time at the Geography Department and Cognitive Science Emphasis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Alex received his Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Bremen, co-authored the project MapSpace which is part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre for Spatial Cognition and worked in the AspectMap project (Spatial Cognition Priority Program, German Science Foundation). He started my Ph.D. studies in Hamburg at the Graduate Program for Cognitive Science.
Random foliage

Frank Hardisty ...



..... is a senior researcher at the Geography Department, an instructor in the he Certificate and Master's Programs in GIS, offered through the World Campus, and a member of the GeoVISTA Center. His research interests are in visualization, spatial statistics, and combining the two to improve the provision of health services. Frank also is the creator of the GeoViz toolkit. More information can be found on his personal homepage.
Random foliage

Rui Li ...



... is studying at Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University towards his PhD degree. Before he moved to State College, he studied in Saskatoon, Canada at the Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, where he received his Master degree. His undergraduate education took place at Wuhan University, 15 hour train ride from his hometown: Chongqing, China. More information can be found on his homepage
Random foliage

Sen Xu ...



... is a graduate student at the Department of Geography, Penn State University. He received his Bachelor's Degree in GISci Major at Center for Spatial Intelligent Computing, Peking University, China, 2008. He specializes in spatial linguistic analyses, exploring the application of various KDD approaches. He is also interested in Spatial Cognition, Thematic Cartography, and Visualization. The on-going GeoCAM project is his current focus. Refer to his personal website for research update and more.

Random foliage

Katie Jablonski ...



... is a senior meteorology undergraduate student with a minor in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This past semester she has been working with Rui Li and Alex Klippel to create icons of different potential disaster path simulations for various natural disasters, using Adobe Flash. The project she is currently working on is to create icons for the scenario if an iceberg were to move towards Greenland, or a similar landform. To create the landform and the iceberg, Katie used Corel Draw. There are different groupings of paths that are differentiated by their spatial relationship between the iceberg and the landform. Once completed, experiments can be run to see how people group the paths differently and how they communicate different path cahracteristics.
Random foliage

Tyler Stoner ...



... is a senior at Penn State, majoring in Geography with the Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) option. He is looking forward to complete his GIS requirements and to in December of 2009. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a career involving GIS technology/software. Tyler is working on geographic scale movement conceptualizations such as paths of hurricanes and is designing material that will be used in human participants test to improve our understanding of how people understand dynamic geographic phenomena.
Random foliage

Tamara Yoder ...



. . . is an undergraduate Geography student with her option in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS). Upon graduation in May 2010, she hopes to start a career utilizing her GIS skills. She keeps busy with her leadership positions in both geography organizations and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences clubs. She is working on spatial cognition experiments that involve wayfinding based on the human mind, such as giving someone the task of finding a book in the library and then analyzing the path they took on their journey.