Chaowei Yang

Chaowei Phil Yang received his Ph.D. from Peking University in 2000 and was recruited as a tenure track Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Science in 2003 by George Mason University. He was promoted as Associate Professor with tenure in 2009 and granted Full Professorship in 2014.

 

His research focuses on utilizing spatiotemporal principles to optimize computing infrastructure to support science discoveries and engineering development. He is leading GIScience computing by proposing several research frontiers including distributed geographic information processing, geospatial cyberinfrstructure, and spatial computing. These research directions are further consolidated through his research, publications, and workforce training activities. For example, he has been funded as PI by multiple resources such as NSF and NASA with over $10M expenditures. He also participated/participates in several large projects total over $30M. He published over 100 papers, edited three books and eight special issues for international journals. He is writing two books and editing two special issues. His publications have been among the top five cited and read papers of IJDE and CEUS. His PNAS spatial computing definition paper is captured by Nobel Intent Blog in 2011. The spatial computing direction was widely accepted by the computer science community in 2013.

 

He has led several teams who impact GIScience profoundly. For example, He led an 8-member team who developed one of the first WebGIS (which was awarded the 10 achievements of Chinese universities in 2000). The team members created 3 companies including the first Chinese GIS company trading in New York Stock Exchange. He led a 3-member team who developed GeoServNet at Univ. of Calgary for Dr.Vincent Tao. The software was evolved into the core of GeoTango, which was purchased by Microsoft as one of the origins of Virtual Earth/Bing Maps. 

 

He is proud of his advisees including over 10 Postdocs, 10 PhD students, and over 30 graduates and undergraduates. Six of his advisees serve as tenure line Professors in the U.S. and 20 of them serve as Associate or Full Professors in China including top geography departments such as Arizona State, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, and Wuhan Univ. He developed a number of GIS courses and programs including the Advanced GeoInformation Science Program (offered since 2006 with over 200 trainees from most provinces of China) and Executive advanced GeoInformation Management program (offered since 2012 as the highest level of geoinformation training ever hosted by a US institution for China). He shared with Dr. Michael Goodchild the first excellence in GIS education award in 2012 given by the international association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Science (CPGIS) because of his leadership contribution in GIScience education.

 

He also served in many public positions, such as the President of the CPGIS (2004-2005), the co-founding chair (2009-2010) of AAG Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group (CISG), and the chair of UCGIS research committee (2012-2014). He received multiple national and international awards, such as the environment protection stewardship award in 2009 from President Obama. He founded the Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing (CISC), and the NSF I/UCRC for spatiotemporal thinking, computing and applications with a group of international leaders from UCSB, Harvard, and GMU. The spatiotemporal innovation center is projected to receive over $2M/year research funding in collaboration with agencies and industry. Through a 5-15 year investigation, the center is targeted to build the national and international spatiotemporal infrastructure to advance a) human intelligence through spatiotemporal thinking, b) computer software and tools through spatiotemporal computing, and c) human capability of responding to deep scientific questions and grand engineering challenges through spatiotemporal applications.