Stephen C. Hirtle

Dr. Stephen C. Hirtle is Professor and SIS Council Chair in School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint appointments in the Department of Psychology and Intelligent Systems Program. He directs the Spatial Information Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducts research on the structure of cognitive maps, navigation in hypertext, and models for spatial cognition. Dr. Hirtle received a bachelor's degree from the Grinnell College in mathematics and psychology in 1976 and a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Mathematical Psychology in 1982. He is the founding co-editor of Spatial Cognition and Computation, past-president of the Classification Society of North America and Book Review Editor of the Journal of Classification. He has had visiting appointments in the Department of Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, the Department of Computer Science at Molde College in Norway, and the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology. He hosted the Third International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'97), in the Laurel Highlands, outside of Pittsburgh, PA, in October of 1997 and co-chaired the NCGIA Varenius Panel on "Cognitive Models of Dynamic Phenomena and Their Representations" in October of 1998 with Alan MacEachren.

Research Interests: spatial information theory; cognitive science; geographic information systems; information visualization; data mining

Teaching Interests: Human Information Processing; Data Mining; Spatial Cognition; Human Factors; Foundations of Cognitive Science;