I was born in Toronto, Ontario, but moved out east to Moncton, New Brunswick when I was 9 years old. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I worked abroad in Japan, China, and Korea for over 8 years, taking the opportunity to travel all over various continents.

I have a Bachelor of Computer Science, Masters of Arts in Applied Linguistics, Master of Science in Geomatics, and I am currently working on my PhD at the University of Waterloo. My current research interests are in extracting spatial meaning and applying relevancy measures to allow for better geographic information retrieval and to start to spatially categorize and better understand the plethora of digitized but unfiltered data available. Specifically, I'm researching ways to better determine experitise levels of anonymous internet users in reference to their local geographic knowledge.

My masters thesis dealt with optimization algorithms - finding optimal grains at which to analyse user-generated data. User-generated data (e.g. tweets, OpenStreetMap, Flickr photos) are inherently unstructured, making it difficult to discern how useful they may be, their accuracy, and at which spatial grains they make sense. Thesis download
The first paper of my thesis won the Best Student Paper/Presentation Award at the Joint International Conference on Geospatial Theory, Processing, Modeling and Applications (ISPRS) in Toronto, Ontario (2014).

Projects:

• RinkWatch - A citizen science project tracking local temperature data from readings by citizens of their backyard rink's skateability. This was featured in the March 2014 issue of National Geographic.
• StressScapes
• Whitechapel - Spatial sentiment analysis of Whitechapel in the late 1800s.