Kate Beard, Professor, Department of Spatial Information Science Engineering, University of Maine.

Dr. Beard has been a research faculty with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) since its beginning in 1989 and currently serves as Director for NCGIA-Maine.  She served as chair of the Department of Spatial information Science and Engineering from 1997 to 2005. She holds a M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1988) from the Institute for Environmental Studies, Land Resources Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison where she specialized in geographic information systems.

She serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association. She served on a National Research Council committee on USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (July 2006-Oct 2007), US. National Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) (2003- 2006), and the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE), Data Access Working Group (2003-2006). She is a member of URISA, AAG, IEEE, and ACM.
Her research interests cover generalization of spatial data, spatial data quality and data quality visualization, metadata, and digital libraries. Her current research interests include modeling, analysis and visualization of spatio-temporal phenomena and spatio-temporal information integration.

Current research projects including directing an NSF IGERT program: Sensor Science, Engineering and Informatics, serving as coPI on a grant from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency on Intelligent Spatial Technologies, as as PI on an NSF grant through the Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics (SEIII) program working with oceanographers to develop an ontology of ocean related events, detect oceanographic events from ocean sensor data streams, and develop methods for visualization and exploration of event patterns.

Dr. Beard has collaborations in the area of bioinformatics and digital libraries.  She served as PI on a two-year grant from NSF to investigate the application of spatial concepts to genome mapping. She currently serves on the Executive Committee for the University of Maine NSF IGERT program in Functional Genomics and currently collaborates with the Jackson Lab and the Maine Institute for Human Genetics and Health on a Maine GeoBioBank project.

Dr Beard was a cooperator on the Alexandria Digital Library project centered at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has investigated several aspects of digital libraries from metadata support for information description and retrieval to visualization of metadata for efficient information browsing and quality evaluation. 

01/26/2009