Oregon State University recently heralded a 2007 Winter Seminar Series offered by the Department of Geosciences. The series, titled “Geovisualization: A Window to Earth Surface, Structure and System,” will be held from January through March and features presentations by 10 speakers, including two of our grad students, in the field of visualizing spatial data. “Geovisualization combines approaches such as 3-D mapping, image processing, computer graphics, animation, simulation, and virtual reality to help present information in a new way,” said Dawn Wright, professor of geosciences at OSU and an expert in geographic information science. “This is a particularly hot area of research right now. We believe it will let us identify patterns, develop a greater understanding and lead to solutions for both some scientific and societal problems.”
Professor Wright was instrumental in inviting two UCSB Geography grad students as “distinguished speakers” for the Geovisualization series. Kirk Goldsberry gave a presentation on “Real-time Traffic Maps for the Internet and Mobile Devices” February 20, and Julie Dillemuth presented “Multi-domain Geovisualization of News Stories” on February 27. More details on the lectures and presenters can be found on the web at .
Dr. Wright (a.k.a “Deepsea Dawn”) received an Individual Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Physical Geography and Marine Geology from UCSB in 1994. Dr. Ray Smith was her advisor, and her dissertation title was “From Pattern to Process on the Deep Ocean Floor: A Geographic Information System Approach.” To quote her web site, “A few years after the deepsea vehicle Argo I was used to discover the HMS Titanic in 1986, Dawn was presented with some of the first geographic information system (GIS) data sets to be collected with that vehicle while a graduate student at UCSB. It was then that she first became acutely aware of the challenges of applying GIS to deep marine environments. She has since completed oceanographic fieldwork (oftentimes with GIS) in some of the most geologically-active regions on the planet, including the East Pacific Rise, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Tonga Trench, volcanoes under the Japan Sea and the Indian Ocean, and, most recently, American Samoa.”
