[Icacogvis] Commission updates and the new leadership team

[Amy Griffin]

RMIT Classification: Trusted

Dear CogVisers,

I hope that as the year comes to a close you are all looking forward to an end-of-year rest and celebration of surviving another lap around the sun with your family and friends.

Those of you who were able to travel to Cape Town would have enjoyed a very well organized 31st International Cartographic Conference. A big thank you to our South African colleagues for all of their work in making that event happen. Our Commission co-developed a pre-conference workshop on Maps and AI along with the Commission on Visual Analytics (now renamed the Commission on Geovisualization). We were graciously hosted by colleagues at the University of Stellenbosch, and the program included lightning talks, practical experiments with maps and various AI platforms, collective brainstorming, and fun with local tools like the vuvuzela. A great mix of people attended the workshop and contributed to a very stimulating and enjoyable day, followed by dinner at one of the local wine bars, another attraction of the Eastern Cape Region. For those of you who were unable to attend, you can have a look at the conference videos and some of the artifacts produced in the experimental sessions at the Commission on Geovisualization’s website: https://viz.icaci.org/. We also wrote a short paper summarizing some of the important points of discussion, which you can find linked on the Commission’s website: https://cogvis.icaci.org/publications.html.

I am writing also to say goodbye and to introduce to you the new CogViz leadership team, as, after 12 years in helping to run the Commission, I have now stepped back from the Commission to allow for new ideas and fresh energy. I’d like to thank Sara Fabrikant for inviting me to help develop the Commission so many years ago. I hope we have created something that is durable, as there is still no shortage of cognitive issues in geographic information visualization to work on.

I am confident that in the near term, the Commission is in good hands. Two of your new leadership team will be familiar faces, as they have been involved in developing and organizing activities in the most recent term, Petr Kubicek (Czechia) and Pyry Kettunen (Finland). Petr and Pyry are joined by two new team members, Hua Liao (China) and Tumasch Reichenbacher (Switzerland). This is a perfect mix of institutional knowledge and experience and new perspectives, and I am confident they will develop stimulating and interesting events and activities to bring researchers from around the world together to work on problems of mutual interest.

If you have not had the pleasure of meeting these colleagues on the leadership team personally, you can find brief profiles of them on the CogVis website: https://cogvis.icaci.org/members.html. I encourage you to reach out to them with your ideas for the Commission. 



I wish the new team every success as they take the Commission into the future, and I am still planning on attending many future Commission events, but now enjoying them as a regular Commission member!

Happy holidays to everyone, whichever of them you celebrate!

Cheers,
Amy


Dr Amy L. Griffin | pronouns: she/hers

Vice President, International Cartographic Association

Senior Lecturer of Geospatial Science
School of Science
RMIT University
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne VIC 3001
Australia
+61 3 9925 2338

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