Laureates

Waldo-Tobler GIScience Prize 2022 laureate: LUC ANSELIN

for his outstanding and sustained contributions to the discipline worthy of inspiring young scientists in Geoinformatics or Geographic Information Science, and for having accomplished significant advances in research and education.

Prof Luc Anselin is currently Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Director, Center for Spatial Data Science - The University of Chicago.

Having held prior appointments at Ohio State University, UC Santa Barbara, West Virgina University, UT Dallas and Arizona State University, Prof Anselin is recognized worldwide as having established the field of Spatial Econometrics. He led the implementation of its models and methods in software tools like GeoDa - designed to facilitate new insights from data analysis by exploring and modeling spatial patterns - and collaborated on other widely adopted tools like PySAL.

These innovations and achievements have been recognized through numerous awards e.g. by the Regional Science Association and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, in 2008 he was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2011 fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  

Prof Anselin accepted the award stating 'I am deeply honored to be selected for this award associated with the late Waldo Tobler. Waldo was a former colleague and friend of mine who influenced my thinking in important ways during my formative years.' Current scientists in their disciplines will recognize the common denominator in spatial analytics, spatial autocorrelation and thus the foundations of spatial data science! 

Through this Award the Austrian Academy of Sciences recognizes an outstanding career of excellence and innovation. Luc Anselin gave his Waldo-Tobler lecture on March 13, 2023.

YRA 2022 laureate: WEIMING HUANG

for his outstanding combination of geovisualization and semantics, which are a novelty in the field of GIScience.

Weiming Huang obtained his PhD in Geographical Information Science at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University in January 2020, under the supervisions of Prof. dr. Lars Harrie and Dr. Ali Mansourian. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sponsored by Prof. Werner Kuhn and Prof. Krzysztof Janowicz. He is currently a Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During his PhD studies, he mainly studied geospatial data integration and visualisation with Semantic Web technologies. He is also the recipient of the EuroSDR award for the best PhD thesis related to geoinformation science. His research interests mainly include geospatial semantic web, information integration, geovisualisation, spatial data mining, and spatial representation learning.