Stephen C. Hirtle

Stephen C. Hirtle is a professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint appointments in the Department of Psychology and in the Intelligent Systems Program. He directs the Spatial Information Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducts research on the structure of cognitive maps, navigation in real and virtual spaces, information visualization, and computational models for spatial cognition. He received a B.A. from the Grinnell College in mathematics and psychology in 1976 and a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Mathematical Psychology in 1982. He was the founding co-editor of Spatial Cognition and Computation and past-president of the Classification Society of North America. Hirtle’s research interests center on spatial information theory with a focus on understanding how spatial concepts are represented, accessed, and utilized in a variety of spatial tasks, such as wayfinding. Hirtle has had visiting appointments in Geoinformatics at the University of Augsburg, Geoinformation at the Vienna University of Technology, Computer Science at Molde University College in Norway, and the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. He hosted the Third International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT’97), in the Laurel Highlands outside of Pittsburgh, PA in October 1997. He also has served on the Board of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science and numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the FWF (Austria).