Unlocking Environmental Narratives

Ross Purves is a professor of Geographic Information Science at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. His research aims to address societally relevant research questions, with the fundamental aim of making theoretical, thematic and methodological contributions to Geographic Information Science. He is particularly interested in developing methods and answering questions through the use of unstructured information, often in the form of text.

Olga Koblet is a former postdoctoral researcher at the Geocomputation Group of the University of Zurich. Her focus lies in the use of unstructured text to better understand landscape and landscape perception. In particular, she has worked on new approaches to extracting descriptions of perception from unstructured text and linking these to landscape character assessment.

Benjamin Adams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His expertise lies in the development and application of information retrieval and machine learning algorithms that aid the collection, management, analysis, and use of large spatial data sets to better support decision-making in complex environments. A key driver of his research is the goal of developing computational methods that can translate unstructured and semi-structured data that are created initially for human communication, such as crowdsourced social media and other natural language text and images, into forms that aid geographic problem solving.