Full-time Employment Experience

Research Associate, in applications of remote sensing and GIS, Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. R. China, 1997-2000.

 

During this period, I had participated in many projects about applications of remote sensing and GIS for exploration of mineral or oil/gas resources. In these projects, I had been in charge of the following tasks:

·       Processing and analysing various remote sensing data, e. g. SAR, TM, NOAA;

·       Extracting interested features from remote sensing data, e. g. promising mineral or oil/gas resource area, ship-speed

·       Processing and managing GIS datasets,

·        Developing an integrated system for oil/gas resource evaluation by integrating remote sensing techniques, geophysical techniques, and geological techniques.

Research Assistant Experience

Research Assistant in the field of collaborative dialogue enabled multimodal GIS in School of Information Sciences & Technology and GeoVISTA Center, Penn State University, since Fall 2001.

 

During this period, I have/had participated in two projects about development of natural, multimodal (speech and gesture) and dialogue-enabled GIS. Both of these two projects are NSF-founded. One is about development of Dialogue-Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation – DAVE_G, and the other is about development of such systems to support geocollaborative crisis management (GCCM).

To quickly see how our collaborative dialogue enabled multimodal system works, please see videos from these two projects: DAVE_G and GCCM.

To see details about design and development of the dialogue manager for the system to support collaborative dialogues between the system and the user, see our related papers from my publications.

To see how the collaborative dialogue facilitates human-GIS communication of vague spatial concepts, you can refer to my dissertation abstract.

 

In these two projects, I had been focused on the following tasks:

·       Design and implementation of the reasoning engine and relevant reasoning algorithms for the dialogue manager in the natural language based GIS to enable the GIS to collaborate and communicate spatial concepts with the user through a collaborative dialogue;

The major design idea is to enable the GIS to emulate a human GIS operator’s role in human-GIS communication.

To better understand human-GIS communication, I have built a human-human communication framework based on studies and theories related human’s geospatial knowledge acquisition, human conceptual system, and human communication. With this framework, we can derive how a human GIS operator can communicate spatial concepts with the user through collaborative dialogues.

To make the GIS to communicate with the user like a human GIS operator agent, the design of the dialogue manager follows an agent-based approach (one of AI approaches), based on related theories and models, e. g. computational collaborative discourse theory  (Grosz and Sidner, 1986), SharedPlan model (Grosz and Kraus, 1996) and Joint Intention model (Cohen & Levesque, 1991), and ReceipeGraph model (Lochbaum, 1994, 1998).

 

·       Design and conducting the experimental study for evaluation of the natural, multimodal GIS (by comparing three GIS, one is speech/gesture enabled GIS, one is speech enabled GIS, and one is ArcView ).

Research Assistant in the field of applied GIS, York University, Canada, summer 2001.

 

During this period, I had participated in a project, GeoDAS, about development of advanced spatial statistical methods in GIS. I had completed implementation of the method, Fuzzy Weights of Evidence, for GeoDAS.

Research Assistant in applications of remote sensing and GIS, Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. R. China, Jul. 1995 – Jul. 1997.

 

During this period, I had participated in a few projects about applications of remote sensing techniques for exploration of mineral or oil/gas resources and detecting ship-waves. In these projects, I had been in charge of the following tasks:

·       Processing and analysing various remote sensing data, e. g. SAR, TM, NOAA;

·       Extracting interested features from remote sensing data, e. g. potential mineral or oil/gas  resources area, ship-waves

·       Processing and managing GIS datasets.