About the author

Matt Duckham is an Associate Professor in Geographic Information Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and works in the Geomatics research group in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering. He also holds an ARC Future Fellowship (2010-2014) for research on the topic of ambient spatial intelligence (AmSI). Before coming to Melbourne in 2004, he worked at the NCGIA (National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis) at the University of Maine, US.

Matt’s research is about robust and distributed computing with geographic information. In addition to his research in decentralized spatial computing, his previous research has included:

• Computing under uncertainty: Investigating mechanisms for reasoning about uncertain geographic information, such as uncovering the hidden structure behind vague human spatial relations, like “near” and “left”; and deducing the scale of digitized maps from the fractal properties of stored geometries.
• Navigation and wayfinding: Defining algorithms for finding not simply the shortest path between two locations, but the easiest path to describe (“simplest paths”); and augmenting online routing systems with the capability to refer to human landmarks, like parks and hospitals.
• Location privacy: Enabling people to access location-based services (like navigation services) while protecting personal information about an individual’s location.

He is also a coauthor, with Prof Mike Worboys, of the second edition of the GIS textbook “GIS: A Computing Perspective” published by CRC Press.

More information about Matt’s publications and research can be found via his website, http://www.duckham.org.