Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf

Biography

Prof. Dr. Alexander Zipf is chair of GIScience (Geoinformatics) at Heidelberg University (Department of Geography) since late 2009. He is member of the Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR), the Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage and PI at the Heidelberg graduate school MathComp. He is also founding member of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE).  From 2012-2014 he was Managing Director of the Department of Geography, Heidelberg University. In 2011-2012 he acted as Vice Dean of the Faculty for Chemistry and Geosciences, Heidelberg University. Since 2012 he is speaker of the graduate school “CrowdAnalyser - Spatio-temporal Analysis of User-generated Content“. He is also member of the editorial board of several further journals and organized a set of conferences and workshops. 2012-2015 he was regional editor of the ISI Journal Transactions in GIS (Wiley). Before coming to Heidelberg he led the Chair of Cartography at Bonn University and earlier was Professor for Applied Computer Science and Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. He has a background in Mathematics and Geography from Heidelberg University and finished his PHD at the European Media Laboratory EML in Heidelberg where he was the first PhD student. There he also conducted further research as a PostDoc for 3 years.

Research Interest

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), Crowdsourcing, Citizens As Sensors Analysis and Processing of Geographic Data 3D-GIS, 3D City and Landscape Models Web-based GIS, GeoWeb 2.0 Location Based Services (LBS) and UbiGIS (Ubiquitous GIS) Interoperability and Standards, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) Integrating new methods from Geoinformatics & GIScience in Geography