Put on a vest and never get lost again! Among dozens of the
research initiatives and experiments going on in the UCSB
Geography Department, you may actually see this futuristic computer-equipped vest as it is road-tested on campus sometime soon. Through the wonders of GIS (geographic information systems) and GPS (global positioning
systems) the vest works in much the same way as that GPS gadget in your car, grabbing satellite
information and transferring it to peripherals such as eyeglasses.
Keith Clarke, the delightful an accomplished chairman of the Geography Department, spoke recently about the current
research being done in his department. Only one geography professor survived the
restructuring of a small program into a
Department in 1974 at UCSB; yet in a mere 30 years of existence the Department has become one of the leading geography
departments in the United States and one of the highest ranked academic
departments on campus, with twenty-two full-time faculty members and office space
scattered across eight buildings. Remarkably, the Geography Dept. at UCSB also leads every other
department in per capita research funds.
The Department has a solid theoretical base of the triad of geospatial data,
interdisciplinary research, and faculty with multidimensional research interests.
Projects range from the Battuta Project (the
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| Geography graduate student Andrea Nuernberger with the UCSB prototype wearable computer vest. |
vest system mentioned above); to theVehicle Intelligence and Transportation Analysis Laboratory (which heads NASA's National Consortium on Remote Sensing in Transportation - Infrastructure Management); to work on maps for the blind and the psychology of human beings dealing with the world around them. (How exactly do we react when we're lost? What goes through the mind?)
Learn more about geography, its faculty, and its research initiatives at:
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu.
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