Principal Investigator
Geoinformatics
UC Santa Barbara, USA
University of Vienna, Austria
Computer Science
Kansas State University
Pascal Hitzler is Professor and endowed Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering Chair and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDS) at the Department of Computer Science at Kansas State University. Until July 2019 he was endowed NCR Distinguished Professor, Brage Golding Distinguished Professor of Research, and Director of Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A. He is director of the Data Semantics (DaSe) Lab. From 2004 to 2009, he was Akademischer Rat at the Institute for Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and from 2001 to 2004 he was postdoctoral researcher at the Artificial Intelligence institute at TU Dresden in Germany. In 2001 he obtained a PhD in Mathematics from the National University of Ireland, University College Cork, and in 1998 a Diplom (Master equivalent) in Mathematics from the University of Tübingen in Germany. His research record lists over 400 publications in such diverse areas as semantic web, artificial intelligence, neural-symbolic integration, knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, denotational semantics, and set-theoretic topology. His research is highly cited. He is founding Editor-in-chief of the Semantic Web journal, the leading journal in the field, and of the IOS Press book series Studies on the Semantic Web. He is co-author of the W3C Recommendation OWL 2 Primer, and of the book Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies by CRC Press, 2010, which was named as one out of seven Outstanding Academic Titles 2010 in Information and Computer Science by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine, and has translations into German and Chinese. He is on the editorial board of several journals and book series and a founding steering committee member of the Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning Association and the Association for Ontology Design and Patterns, and he frequently acts as conference chair in various functions, including e.g. General Chair (ESWC2019, us2ts2019), Program Chair (FOIS 2018, AIMSA2014), Track Chair (ISWC2018, ESWC2018, ISWC2017, ISWC2016, AAAI-15), Workshop Chair (K-Cap2013), Sponsor Chair (ISWC2013, RR2009, ESWC2009), PhD Symposium Chair (ESWC 2017). For more information about him, see http://www.pascal-hitzler.de.
Environmental Sciences
NCEAS, UCSB
Schildhauer is currently a co-PI on NSF's Arctic Data Center, and an Associate at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, with research interests in the conceptual modeling of environmental data, and the use of semantic technologies for advancing scientific data discovery, interpretability, and interoperability. Schildhauer was Director of Computing at NCEAS from it's opening in 1995 until 2017, charged with building and maintaining the computational infrastructure, and supervising the scientific computing staff who assisted researchers in accomplishing high-end environmental analyses and syntheses. The challenges of supporting those efforts over the years have led to his current interests in semantic technologies. Before focusing on technologies that facilitate scientific synthesis, Mark worked in aquatic and population biology (PhD), with extensive field experience in coral reef and temperate rocky intertidal ecosystems.
Urban Planning and Geoinformatics
Arizona State University
Dr. Wenwen Li is an Associate Professor in GIScience in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University. Her research interests include cyberinfrastructure, geospatial big data, machine learning and their applications in data-intensive environmental and social sciences. Li is the co-PI on the grant, she will be leading the efforts to develop knowledge graph visualization methods that address the need of different end users (data scientists, geospatial data analysts, general public and beyond).
Humanities
Michigan State University
Dean Rehberger is the Director of Matrix and faculty in the at MSU. Dean specializes in developing digital technologies for research and teaching. He has run numerous faculty technology and workshops and given presentations for educators and cultural heritage workers from local, national and international audiences.
Dean teaches a variety of courses at MSU for History and Museum Studies. He also helps to design and develop online courses for History.
Dean oversees Matrix project planning, research and development, coordinating many of the grant-funded projects for the Center. His research includes Semantic Web and big data; digital history, humanities, and social sciences; digital libraries, museums and archives (GLAM); and digital technologies in the classroom.
Senior Personnel
IN10T
Randy Barker is the co-founder and CEO of IN10T. He co-founded the company with Kevin Heikes, COO, in 2016 to help streamline the product adoption process, connecting ag businesses with farmers and helping deliver the valuable insights to drive decisions toward a successful future.
Barker has more than 25 years of experience in agribusiness and has worked in over 30 countries, helping launch a number of ag technologies on a global scale. He began his career in Canada at Agricore United and later joined Monsanto Canada as Vice President of Crop Protection for the agriculture, forestry and industrial businesses. Barker relocated to Monsanto's global headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, where he served in various leadership roles with global responsibility before he left to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.
Barker holds a bachelor's degree in Seed Technology from Olds College, a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture and Economics from the University of Lethbridge, and an MBA from the University of Guelph.
Ph.D. Student
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Senior Personnel
MSU
Bruno Basso, professor of earth and environmental sciences, integrates diverse disciplines such as biophysics, climatology, hydrology, genetics, agronomy and soil science to understand the spatial and temporal variabilities of crop yield and environmental outcomes in agricultural systems. Basso, originally from Italy, received his Laurea in agricultural sciences from the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and his Ph.D. in crop and soil sciences from Michigan State University. After earning his doctorate, Basso spent 12 years as a professor at the University of Basilicata, Italy, before returning to MSU in 2012.
Student at STKO Lab
Department of Geography
UC Santa Barbara
Ling Cai, a third-year PhD student at STKO Lab, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her advisor is Professor Krzysztof Janowicz. She has a very rich range of interests, including temporal knowledge graphs, semantic web, recommender systems, urban computing, etc. Nowadays, she is immersed herself in developing temporally-explicit machine learning/deep learning models for downstream tasks in knowledge graphs,for instance, link prediction, conjunctive querying and reasoning.
Graduate Student
KASTLE Lab
Wright State University
Postdoc
UCSB
PhD Candidate
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Research Scientist
UCSB Climate Hazards Center
Frank Davenport is a research scientist within the UCSB Climate Hazards Center. His research focuses on the intersections of climate, food systems, food security, and human health. Frank's work often intersects with the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) as he tries to discover and document the relationships among weather, crop production, prices, and food security. He spends a lot of time exploring how to forecast food security inputs and outcomes and trying to make that information accessible to the famine response community. Frank also has a strong interest in spatial-time series analysis and, more recently, machine learning. In his previous life, Frank spent about 5 years as a GIS Analyst and strategic planner, implementing enterprise GIS and decision support systems for environmental agencies in California, Panama, and the United Arab Emirates.
Developer
Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences
Michigan State University
UCSB
Karen Doehner is the Administrative Coordinator of the Center for Spatial Studies (spatial@ucsb) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She handles planning and administrative functions at the center.
Research Assistant
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Andrew is a research assistant in the DaSe Lab at Kansas State University, with a primary focus on the use of Wikidata and other open knowledge graphs for knowledge sharing and validation. His background is in Computer Science, Linguistics, and Anthropology.
Managing Partner, Director of R&D
Hydronos Labs, Oliver Wyman (Consultant)
Senior Personnel
Esri
Senior Personnel
MSU
Head of Software Development
Matrix
Michigan State University
Seila Gonzalez is Director of Programming at Matrix. She holds a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama, with a research focus on non-polynomial time algorithms on a hardware software co-design. She manages and oversees the design and development of all software, including frontend and backend website interactions, database design, and roadmapping software development such as Kora, Matrix's digital repository platform. Gonzalez oversees the work of all Matrix developers including undergraduate programmers to ensure the adherence of best practices. She has experience in multiple programming languages and types of databases. She has implemented semantic web-based systems and standards for ontology-centered knowledge graphs, including work on data integration and implementation of SPARQL queries. Prior to coming to MSU, Gonzalez worked in the private sector as a java software engineer and GIS software developer.
PhD Student
Arizona State University
Senior Personnel
Esri
Senior Personnel
UCSB
Matt directs the Informatics program at NCEAS, which focuses on both supporting efficient synthesis through scientific computing and on building new advanced infrastructure to support data sharing, preservation, analysis, and modeling. Matt is the Director of the DataONE program, a global network of interoperable data repositories, and of the NSF Arctic Data Center. In addition to data infrastructure work at NCEAS, Matt also helps to build the NCEAS Learning Hub through an emphasis on data science and reproducible research teaching.
Matt's career has focused on improving data science infrastructure to support cross-disciplinary and synthetic science, principally through the development of open source software for data repositories, metadata systems, and reproducible analysis and modeling.
Matt has a M.S. in Zoology from the University of Florida that focused on the ecology of plant-animal interactions, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.
Partner and Vice Chairman, Financial Services Americas
Oliver Wyman
Partner
Oliver Wyman
Ph.D. Student
STKO Lab
Department of Geography
University of Vienna
From a GIScience perspective, Zilong Liu studies how humans understand (e.g., perceive, categorize, conceptualize) the world. Much of his recent work (e.g., Knowledge Explorer) is carried out in collaboration with the KnowWhereGraph community. Currently, Zilong is a University Assistant working at Vienna International School of Earth and Space Sciences on advancing spatial and temporal principles of knowledge representation and reasoning.
Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist
Research and Analysis Group
Direct Relief
Anna Lopez-Carr is the Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for the Research and Analysis group at Direct Relief, one of the world's leading private NGOs based in Santa Barbara, California. Anna's field of expertise is Human Geography with an emphasis on health, population, and the environment. Before joining Direct Relief, Anna was a geo-spatial consultant for the Food Security Unit at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome. She received her PhD in Geography from the Joint Doctoral Program at San Diego State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara; and her Master of Science in Political Ecology from the University of London.
Ph.D. Student
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Mohammad is a Ph.D. Student at Kansas State University working under Dr. Hitzler's supervision. He has a master's in Artificial Intelligence and is interested in Explainable AI. His research includes leveraging the power and transparency of the Semantic Web technologies in Deep Learning methods. In addition, his work in the KWG project involves integrating different datasets into the KWGraph and helping to improve the automation/parallelization of this process.
Ph.D. Candidate
Space and Time for Knowledge Organization Lab
Department of Geography
UC Santa Barbara
Gengchen Mai is a Ph.D. candidate at Space and Time for Knowledge Organization Lab, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. Mai's research interests are Geographic Knowledge Graph, Spatially-Explicit Machine Learning, GeoAI, Geographic Question Answering, and NLP. Mai has done ML/AI related internships at Esri Inc., SayMosaic Inc., and Apple Map in the past summers. Mai is an AI resident at Google X this summer.
Partner and Global Industry Association, Civic, and Economic Organization Lead
Oliver Wyman
Software Developer
Hydronos Labs
Science Software Engineer
NCEAS, UCSB
Senior Personnel
Esri
Ph.D. Student
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Senior Personnel
USC
Paulina Oliva is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department of the University of Southern California. Oliva received her PhD in Economics from UC, Berkeley in 2009. She specialize in the fields of Environmental Economics and Development; and specifically, on the relationship between air pollution and health and on environmental policy effectiveness in the developing world. Her work uses a variety of microeconometric techniques to study individual incentives and human impacts of air pollution.
Partner
Oliver Wyman's Commodity and Risk Practices
Scott Robinson is a Partner in Oliver Wyman's Commodity and Risk Practices. He is leading a Natural Resource effort focused on advanced analytics related to supply chain disruption, commodity price forecasting and environment risks. His career has spanned more than 30 years in both the capital markets and commodities industries focused on growth strategies through technological innovation, predictive analytics and acquisitions.
VP of Research and Analysis
Direct Relief
Andrew Schroeder is the VP of Research and Analysis for Direct Relief, one of the world's leading NGOs, based in Santa Barbara, CA. He leads Direct Relief's work in spatial analysis for humanitarian logistics and global public health. Andrew is also the co-founder of the Covid-19 Mobility Data network along with colleagues at Harvard School of Public Health, which provides analysis of aggregated mobility data from smart phones social media sources to public health officials for response to Covid-19, and the co-founder of WeRobotics, which builds local capacity in the applications of autonomous systems for social good in nearly 30 countries. He received his PhD from New York University in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and his Masters of Public Policy from the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Andrew's role in the project is to guide the engagement with Direct Relief on two specific projects. One is focused on effective search for humanitarian expertise to improve how humanitarian organizations may deploy specific, relevant experts to further their missions. The other is focused on spatial and temporal data to improve humanitarian logistics for response to pandemic disease threats including Covid-19.
Center Manager
Matrix
Michigan State Unviersity
Alicia M Sheill is Center Manager at Matrix the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State Unviersity. She has over fifteen years of project management experience and currently co-manages The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade, a knowledge graph project with multiple international partners. She works on the Know Where Graph project where she consults on data readiness, standardization of metadata and vocabularies, audiences for historical data and use cases, historical geo-spatial data, data cleaning and leveraging Open Refine, reconciling data against a Wikibase installation, aligning ontologies, integrating data into a Wikibase through Quick Statements, and knowledge graph ready data on historic slavery.
PhD Student
STKO
University of Vienna
Senior Personnel
Wright State University
Senior Advisor, Soil Scientist
Hydronos Labs, Oliver Wyman
David Smith is a soil scientist, formerly a federal Senior Executive with USDA, who has been working on independent consulting projects since 2018 utilizing extensive knowledge of soil science and natural resources management and organizational leadership. He is currently working with Oliver Wyman (OW), New York, NY as a Senior Advisor assisting in developing an agriculture and natural resources business platform within the company, and is developing a knowledge graph use case around food supply and sustainability as part of the KnowWhereGraph NSF Phase II project.
Postdoc
UCSB
Software Engineer
Thomas develops products that help researchers store, share, and reproduce their experiments in convenient ways. This work is done through the Whole Tale project.
Thomas is interested in simulation of physical processes, mathematics, and has previously worked on technology for characterizing nanoparticles.
Thomas completed his bachelors in Chemical Engineering at Montana State University.
Ph.D. Student
The School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning
Arizona State University
Yuanyuan Tian is a PhD student in Geographical Information Science in The School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University. Her research interests include cyberinfrastructure, knowledge graph, coastal management, flooding, and urban transportation.
Designer
MSU
Senior Scientist
U.S. Geological Survey
Lynn Usery is a Senior Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Usery's work is in cartographic and geospatial theory and knowledge representation focusing on cognition, theoretical data models, semantics, and knowledge graphs within the domains of general cartography, topographic data, and map projections. Usery contributions to the project will include provision of theory, geospatial data from USGS repositories, and knowledge graphs built with semantic geospatial concepts.
Research Scientist
U.S. Geological Survey
Dalia Varanka is a Research Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Dr. Varanka's graduate degrees focused on urban environmental geography and spatial information theory. Dr. Varanka began her Federal career in 1993 and has been a research scientist since 1999 with the National Geospatial Program, that supports the national topographic mapping program. Dr. Varanka leads the Geospatial Semantics and Ontology project of the Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/ngp/cegis). Dr. Varanka serves as Chair of the International Cartography Association Commission on Geospatial Semantics.
PhD Student
The School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering
Arizona State University
Sizhe Wang is a PhD student in the The School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, majoring computer science. His research topics mainly focus on pattern recognition and detection, information retrieval, and scientific data visualization involving geospatial datasets. Along with the group, he will apply his knowledge and make contribution on knowledge graph visualization to address various demands in the project.
Graduate Student
UCSB
Chief Scientist
Esri and Professor of Geography and Oceanography
Oregon State University
Dawn Wright, Chief Scientist of Esri and Professor of Geography and Oceanography at Oregon State University. Joint PhD in Physical Geography/Marine Geology from UCSB. At Esri, Dawn is responsible for strengthening the scientific foundation for Esri software and services, while representing Esri to the scientific community. She is also lead Esri liaison on NSF-funded projects with university partners, and on this project will be providing "connective tissue" to Esri's knowledge graph and geo-enrichment teams, and, as needed, to the Esri GeoAI team.
Ph.D. Student
DaSe Lab
Kansas State University
Joe is an incoming Ph.D. student in Dr. Hitzler's Data Semantics Lab at Kansas State University. Joe's BS is in computer science. Joe's main interests are logic, algorithms, and theoretical computer science. Joe expects his role on the KWG project will involve ontology modeling, but Joe is available for miscellaneous tasks.
Postdoc
K-State
Lu Zhou is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Data Semantics Laboratory at Kansas State University. He is currently working with Dr. Pascal Hitzler on the topic of Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Data Integration. More specifically, Knowledge Graph Construction and Enrichment, Ontology Matching and Alignment, Entity Linking, Coreference Resolution, Natural Language Processing, and Applied Machine Learning.
Lecturer (Assistant Professor)
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Fellow
Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Rui Zhu is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include geospatial semantics, spatial statistics, as well as their broader interactions in geospatial artificial intelligence (Geo-AI). More concretely, he combines theory-informed approach and data-driven appraoch to address geospatial challenges such as geospatial data interoperability, spatial predictions, qualitative spatial reasoning, and so on. Zhu's work has been applied to a wide range of applications, indluding urban studies, global health, environmental modeling, as well as humanitarian aids. He is currently working on the KnowWhereGraph (KWG) project funded by NSF.
Zhu obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020 under the advise of Dr. Krzysztof Janowicz and Dr. Phaedon Kyriakidis. He holds a M.S. degree in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh working with Dr. Hassan Karimi.