Chris Gold has worked on the development of GIS methods since the 1970s, and is particularly concerned about the integration of geographical analysis and algorithms, and cooperation with the Computer Science community. As part of his EU Chair responsibilities he is travelling extensively in Europe, giving workshops on GIS algorithms and methods.
As well as his current emphasis on spatial data structures and algorithms, he has had extensive experience in applications such as forestry, geology, landscape modelling and marine navigation.
Professor Christopher Gold
1. Areas of research expertise
Professor Gold has been active for over 20 years in the development of spatial data structures, spatial models of perception and adjacency, Geo-informatics applications, and algorithms. He has approximately 200 publications and presentations in many fields – GIS (Geographic Information Science), Computer Science, Geology, Forestry and others. He is known in the Geo-informatics community for his work on spatial data structures, Voronoi diagrams, dynamic mapping and 3D modelling. He is known within the Computational Geometry community for his work on GIS applications. He has been active in Mathematics conferences, in Geology and Engineering workshops, and in Forestry. He has made presentations or organized workshops in Canada, USA, Europe and China. He has received a variety of honours from Canadian and Asian associations, and he has collaborated with a wide variety of researchers in Europe, North America and Asia. He has supervised approximately 20 research students and research assistants.
In particular he has worked to bring the GIS and Computer Science communities closer together, publishing in both types of journals. He is known in a variety of countries for his work on Voronoi diagrams, both in algorithmic development and in their application to a wide variety of Geo-informatics disciplines: geology, forestry, engineering, etc. He has been active in promoting the concept of interactive mapping and decision support systems, as well as the management of dynamic and 3D data, and simulation techniques. He has had particularly strong research collaboration with China, having been involved with researchers there for over ten years.
His best-known research has been concerned with Voronoi diagrams as a fundamental spatial model for many GIS application areas. He has also published a variety of papers on problems of interactive spatial display, dynamic and kinetic simulation of spatial processes, and Spatial Decision Support Systems.
2. Current role and other recent posts of relevance
In September 2004 Professor Chris Gold, took up the post of “Marie Curie Chair” with the Geographical Information Systems Research Group in the University of Glamorgan’s School of Computing. Marie Curie Chairs are one of the several Marie Curie Actions under the EU Framework Six Programme - Human Resources and Mobility. These professorial appointments are a mechanism to highlight personal achievements of world-class researchers by offering them top-level appointments in Europe, to support career development and international recognition.
In the first round, 11 Chairs were funded throughout the whole of Europe - two of these were awarded to UK universities, the University Of Glamorgan being one. The Chairs are awarded to individuals who are considered world class specialists in their field. Professor Chris Gold is eminent within the GIS field. He is in the process of establishing an international research group in geo-informatics and visualization. His Chair duties include organizing European conferences and workshops on spatial data visualization, and he will be travelling extensively – several workshops have already been given.
From 2000-2004 he was Professor of GIS at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics. As the second Full Professor in the Department, he was “Departmental Research Committee Chairman”, responsible for all research activity in the Department. This included all research expenses, research students and admissions, research assistants/professionals, research grant proposals, and many other duties. He worked on building up the research profile of the Department, and overseeing the transition to a more open, international, research student (M.Phil. and Ph.D.) system, with appropriate coursework.
He was also responsible for several Departmental research grant applications, including a successful HK$8.1M Intelligent Transportation Systems proposal, a HK$20M “Area of Excellence” proposal in Geomatics (in collaboration with HK Chinese University), and in a HK$20M grant proposal with the Multimedia Innovation Centre (largely involved in computer games development) concerning applications of dynamic, interactive 3D visualization of real-world applications, such as marine GIS. His personal research grants (typically about HK$500,000 each) concerned the development of a Marine GIS, modelling the “Polyhedral Earth”, improved Terrain Modelling and Interactive Landscaping, and Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Landslide Management. He continued his collaboration with Mainland China, including being co-author of a book on terrain modelling.
Prof. Gold has been involved in the development and management of two large Canadian research endeavours in Geo-informatics. In 1990 he was appointed the Senior Researcher of an Industrial Research Chair funded by the Quebec Forest Industry and the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Three researchers were funded to apply Geo-informatics to forest management problems. He was involved in the initial research proposal and its renewal in 1995. This funding supported three researchers, plus two research professionals plus several research students for the maximum ten years. Apart from funding and reporting responsibilities, the key issues were negotiating with the industry consortium, developing a research agenda and developing effective ongoing communication mechanisms, including a newsletter – and learning French! There were two junior faculty members in the chair, and they had over 20 graduate (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) students (directed and co-directed) as well as post-doctoral researchers and professionals. The Chair had the purpose of assisting the Quebec forest industry to apply geomatics tools (GIS, remote sensing, GPS, etc.) to forest management of extremely large tracts of land. The emphases were on data input, data collection and decision support systems. He was asked to form this chair in 1990, based on his work with dynamic spatial data structures. He was responsible for the negotiation of several agreements with Quebec forest companies, as well as for presentations to company Vice-Presidents and government Deputy Ministers. The Chair held seminars and demonstrations, as well as review meetings three times a year with industry representatives, and produced a regular newsletter.
The second large project was the establishment of the ongoing GEOIDE (“GEOmatics for Informed DEcisions”) Network of Centres of Excellence in Geomatics in 1998-9, also funded by NSERC plus a consortium of government and industry partners. This was a major coup for Geo-informatics: only three were established across all disciplines. Three researchers, including Prof. Gold, started the activity, and he initiated the suggestion that it should cover the whole range of Geo-informatics-related activities, starting with observations on the land, covering algorithms, data processing, analysis and visualization, and ending with the final product – a good decision by the appropriate management. They had to cover all the major scientific disciplines: science, engineering, medicine and social sciences. This was achieved by developing a series of “Thrusts” (research domains, e.g. GPS) and “Themes” (application domains, e.g. forestry). Prof. Gold left for Hong Kong at the end of 1999, and the other two remain as GEOIDE managers. He spent five years as Professor of GIS at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
3. Major esteem indicators
Honorary Fellow: Hong Kong Institute of Engineering Surveyors, 2002-present.
Senior Researcher: NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Geomatics Applied to Forestry, 1990-1999
Member: Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta (“P.Geol.”), 1985-present.
Academician, International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, Minsk, 1995.
Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA): “Automated analysis and display of geological data”, 19781980.
EU Marie-Curie Chair, University of Glamorgan, September 2004 – August 2007
Chairman, ISPRS Working Group on Dynamic and Multidimensional GIS, 2004-present.
Editorial Boards: Spatial Cognition and Computation (since inception), International Journal of GIS (since inception), GeoInformatica (since inception) and Cartographica (1984-90).
Inaugural Editorial Board of the new Springer-Verlag journal “Transactions on Computational Science”, responsible for Computational Geometry and GIS, 2005.
Programme Committee: ACM Conference on Computational Geometry, Hong Kong, June 2000.
Organizer, ISPRS Workshop on Dynamic and Multidimensional GIS (DMGIS05), University of Glamorgan, September 2004
Organizing Committee, Voronoi Conference on Analytic Number Theory and Spatial Tessellations, Kiev, Ukraine, September 2003, and International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering Banff, Canada, July 2006
Organizer, 4th International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering, 2007
Invited Keynote Speaker:
GISRUK Conference, Sheffield, April 2002
Hong Kong GIS Association meeting, Hong Kong, 2002
11th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Leicester, August 2004
GISRUK 2005, Topology Workshop, April 2005
International Conference on Computational Science, Singapore, May 2005
Seminar on Geo-information and Computational Geometry, Utrecht, November 2005
“Kortdage” (Danish Map Days), November 2005
“The World a Jigsaw”, Lorenz Institute, Leiden, March 2006
First International Workshop on Mobile Geospatial Augmented Reality (May, Banff, Canada)
Inaugural Keynote, GIScience 2006, Münster, Germany
Workshops/Tutorials given as EU Chair Activities
Ecole navale, Brest, November 2004
Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki, March 2005 (5 days)
Oceans 05 Conference, Brest, June 2005
City University, London, June 2005 (5 days)
University of Glamorgan (with DMGIS05), September 2005
Developers’ Group, London, September 2005
Five French high schools in Brittany, November 2005, “Careers in Science” (British Council)
Technical University of Vienna, January 2006 (5 days)
University of Gavle, Sweden, June 2006
University of Münster, Germany, September 2006 (5 days)