Stephen C. Hirtle

Dr. Stephen C. Hirtle is Professor 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 real and virtual spaces, and computational 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 was 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 Geoinformatics at the University of Augsburg in Germany, Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, the Computer Science at Molde College in Norway, and the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. 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. He has also served on the Board of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science and numerous reviews panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

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;