Graduate Student Profiles

Ken Pelman

Ken Pelman graduated in May 2011 with his Master of GIS degree. His advisor was GeoVISTA Assistant Director Dr. Anthony Robinson. Ken came to the Penn State MGIS program (www.pennstategis.com) after completing his M.S. degree at University Park in the Department of Meteorology and taking a job in Washington, DC at NOAA. While working at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center he’s been working on his MGIS degree, in addition to raising two sons with his wife.

On May 10, 2011, Ken presented his capstone research project at the 2011 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Ken completed a software tool called EvacSpace (www.evacspace.com) that is designed to support rapid evacuation planning through an interactive, visually-enabled interface. Ken received a travel stipend to support his trip to Portugal to present on behalf of the GeoVISTA Center and MGIS program. Read more about this grad student . . .

Sen Xu

Sen Xu is a Ph.D student in Geography at Penn State, working under the advisement of Dr. Alexander Klippel. Sen is also enrolled in a Ph.D Minor in Computational Science from Department of Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, PSU. Last fall, Sen received his Master of Science degree in Geography with his thesis entitled, Exploring regional variation in spatial language - a case study on spatial orientation by using volunteered spatial language data.

As a graduate affiliate of the GeoVISTA Center, Sen contributes to both the GeoCAM and the STempo projects. He specializes in spatial linguistic analyses, exploring the application of various knowledge discovery and data mining approaches. He is also interested in Spatial Cognition, Thematic Cartography, Visualization, Crowd-sourcing, and Knowledge Mining (from the Web). Sen is also a member in Human Factors in GIScience Lab. Read more about this grad student . . .

Ritesh Agrawal

Ritesh Agrawal graduated with his PhD in the spring of 2010, having worked under Dr. Donna Peuquet. Ritesh currently works as a Research Engineer for AT&T Interactive in San Francisco, and is one of six people who have been designated as the initial team in the new west-coast AT&T research lab. Ritesh's dissertation focused on a holistic approach for dealing with the information overload problem within the modern computing environment. His approach and prototype implementation incorporate tools for the breadth of needed tasks for learning about spatial and space-time domains, including information filtering, knowledge acquisition, organization, transfer and recall. Read more about this grad student . . .

Kevin Ross

Kevin Ross (kevin [at] ksross.com) graduated with his Master's Degree in Geography in the summer of 2010 under the advisement of Dr. Alan M. MacEachren. Kevin's thesis focused on geocollaboration, specifically how teams of people query structured spatial data in a same-time, different-place geocollaboration environment. For this research, he developed a conceptual framework for how to support this type of collaboration, programmed a web-based software application based on this framework, then conducted a user study with this software to analyze how people collaboratively query spatial data. Kevin also worked on other GeoVISTA projects during his two years as a research assistant. He contributed to the development of the original prototype of SensePlace, a tool to support rapid web document acquisition and contextualization. The main project Kevin worked on as a research assistant, and continues to work on, is CrimeViz -- a web-based map application that supports exploration and sensemaking of criminal activity in space and time. Read more about this grad student . . .

Adrienne Gruver

Adrienne Gruver graduated in August 2009 with a Master's Degree in Geography, having worked under Dr. Cynthia Brewer. Adrienne is now the lead instructor for Geography 486, Cartography and Visualization at the Dutton e-Education Institute. Her thesis looked at the use of geovisualization tools in epidemiology and public health. Through in-depth case studies with epidemiological researchers using a geovisualization application for data exploration and analysis, Adrienne's research provides examples of the utility of geovisualization for health-related research, and contributes evidence toward ways geovisualization can improve to meet epidemiological users' needs. Read more about this grad student . . .

Jin Chen

Jin Chen (jxc93[at] psu.edu) defended his doctoral thesis last semester, having worked under Dr. Alan MacEachren. During his time at the GeoVISTA Center, first as research staff and later as graduate student, Chen's scientific pursuits have had two foci: (1) developing methods for data analysis and knowledge construction from spatial, temporal, and multivariate data; and (2) applying those methods to address practical problems in sub-disciplines of geography including public health, environment, natural hazards, economics, and so on. His research adopts multidisciplinary approaches ranging from cartography to visualization, statistics, computation, data mining and artificial intelligence. Read more about this grad student . . .

Craig McCabe

Craig McCabe (cam509 [at] psu.edu) graduated this summer with his Master's Degree in Geography, having worked under Dr. Alan M. MacEachren. McCabe's thesis looked at the effects of data complexity and map abstraction on the perception of spatio-temporal patterns in animated maps. Using a 10-year dataset of weekly measles infections in Niger, Craig administered an experiment that employed temporal aggregation and moving-window averaging approaches in combination with geographic and schematic map representations to measure participants' abilities to complete a series of map-reading tasks. During his 2 years as a research assistant at Penn State, Craig collaborated closely with the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics to create novel methods of exploring patterns and possible environmental drivers of measles epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. Read more about this grad student . . .

Tom Auer

Tom Auer (mta138 [at] psu.edu) graduated in the summer of 2009 with his Master's Degree in Geography, having worked under Dr. Alan M. MacEachren. Auer's thesis sought to understand whether explicitly symbolizing time-series change in map animations would help users recognize patterns in those animations, showing that for animated map reading tasks explicitly about change, symbolizations encoding change were most successful. As a corollary, Auer developed a task typology on movement patterns found in aggregated point data. Working as a research assistant, Auer helped develop a web-map, CalFloraViz, which allows the quick and easy spatiotemporal exploration of a large California plant sample collection. Read more about this grad student . . .