News from the 2009 UCGIS Summer Assembly
http://www.ucgis.org/summer2009

The UCGIS Summer Assembly 2009 took place at the Bishop's Lodge Ranch Resort & Spa, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The meeting attracted delegates from member institutions from across the United States, representing academia, industry, and government to learn about, and participate in setting future directions for, cutting-edge GIScience research and education. The meeting's theme was Complex Systems Science with a continuing supporting theme of Cyberinfrastructure, both of which are emerging areas of great interest in geographic information science, with related ties to sustainability science, land use change, economic stability, and ecosystem resilience

Highlights of the meeting include:

• Research Plenary on Complex Systems and Cyberinfrastructure, with presentations by
  • Luis M. A. Bettencourt , Los Alamos National Laboratory (presentation)
  • Damian Gessler, iPlant Collaborative, University of Arizona (presentation)
  • Kevin Boyack, Chief Technical Officer SciTech Strategies, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico (presentation)
  • May Yuan, UCGIS President-Elect, University of Oklahoma (presentation)
    
    
• Education plenary on scale, complexity, and needs for spatial analysis in education, with presentations by
  • Carl Steinitz, Harvard University and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (presentation)
  • Stephen Guerin (Redfish Group Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Fabio Carrera (Venice Project Center Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, Massachusetts)
  • Kevin Boyack, Chief Technical Officer SciTech Strategies, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico (presentation)

• UCGIS student scholar session, with presentations by:
  • Thomas Pingel, University of California, Santa Barbara (presentation)
  • Liang Mao, University at Buffalo, State University of New York (presentation)
  • Hunter Allen, University of Georgia
  • Darren Ruddell, Arizona State University (presentation)

UCGIS Research and Education Awards

UCGIS Research Award
http://www.ucgis.org/summer2009/researchaward.htm

Dr. Hanan Samet, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, is the recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award.Hanan Samet is recognized for his landmark book, Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures (2006, Morgan-Kaufmann), a 1000+-page, single-authored tour de force demonstrating his outstanding research on the theory and practice of GIScience. This book was also an award winner in the “Best Book in Computer and Information Science” competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP).

UCGIS Education Award
http://www.ucgis.org/summer2009/educationaward.htm

David M. Mark is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo (UB), the State University of New York, and is the Director of the Buffalo site of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). Mark also is Project Director of the University at Buffalo’s two NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) projects in Geographic Information Science, projects that together have supported more than 60 doctoral level trainees in GIScience, in seven academic departments.

Student Travel Awards and Prizes
http://www.ucgis.org/summer2009/studentpapers.htm

Four students received UCGIS Student Travel Awards to attend the Summer Assembly and present their research.

• Liang Mao, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, was awarded the Transactions in GIS award.
• Thomas Pingel, University of California, Santa Barbara, received the Cartography and Geographic Information Science award.

2009 Intergraph and ESRI Junior Faculty Award
http://www.ucgis.org/summer2009/applicationsaward.htm

Yunwoo Nam, University of Nebraska	Elizabeth Groff, Temple University	Chuanrong Zhang, University of Connecticut	Sara Metcalf, SUNY Buffalo

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) joins UCGIS.
http://www.rit.edu/cast/cms/UCGIS/main_html/index.html

New UCGIS Chairs Appointed in 2009
http://www.ucgis.org/aboutucgis/officersdisplay.asp

• Dr. Don Janelle, University of California, Santa Barbara, was appointed the Membership Chair, August, 2009.
• Dr. Diansheng Guo, University of South Carolina, was appointed the Communications Chair, June, 2009.

UCGIS Summer and Winter Meetings in 2010

• UCGIS Winter Meeting ● Doubletree Hotel, Washington, DC ● February 4-5, 2010
• UCGIS Summer Assembly ● Crowne Plaza Hotel, Hilton Head Island, SC ● June 15-16, 2010