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Jean-Claude Thill
Knight Distinguished Professor
OFFICE: 432 McEniry
PHONE: 704-687-5909
E-MAIL: jfthill@uncc.edu
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TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS:
• Transportation and Mobility Systems
• Geographic Information Science (GIS-T)
• Spatial Modeling
• Regional Science
DEGREES:
Ph.D. (1988) Geography, Université Catholique de Louvain,
Belgium
M.S. (1984) Regional Science, Université Catholique de Louvain,
Belgium
B.S. (1982) Geography, Université Catholique de Louvain,
Belgium
PROFILE:
Building from a background in economic geography and spatial modeling,
my work during the 1990s focused on issues of spatial organization
associated with the location of economic agents in a competitive
environment and with the behaviors underpinning destination choices.
Presently, my interests relate to two broad themes, namely transportation
and mobility systems, and spatial knowledge discovery. In an increasingly
mobile world, the ability for people, freight, capital, and ideas
to move creates new spatial structures, while erasing others. I
am particularly interested in the modalities of spatial operations
of transportation and communication networks and of their articulation
with their surrounding regions, in technologies and policies that
frame these modalities, and in the socio-economic implications on
the regional context. An understanding of the complexity and dynamics
of new modalities of spatial interaction is suitably gained with
new computational techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis
and artificial intelligence. These two themes are closely woven
throughout my research and teaching.
In my transportation and mobility systems research, my work has
spanned from economic development impacts of transportation-related
investments, benefits evaluation of public investments in Intelligent
Transportation Systems, the regional advantage of accessibility
derived from freight intermodalism in domestic and international
commerce (a large-scale multi-modal geo-spatial network is the core
database of this project), locational data accuracy and structures
compatible with the requirements of wireless location-based technologies,
qualitative georeferencing of objects for embedding in location-based
information services (LBS), data models and data requirements of
vehicular, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic safety, to models of
optimal routing and dispatching of commercial trucks and emergency
response teams.
In spatial analysis, my work has particularly focused on spatial
autocorrelation patterns in vectoral data such as origin-destination
flows or theft-recovery location crime data, as well as data mining
on networks (car crash analysis), in flow data (airline passenger
flows between U.S. air traffic centers), and multidimensional geospatial
databases of dialectal features. In the latter projects, self-organizing
maps (SOM) have been implemented in conjunction with visual interfaces
in the attribute and geographic space to tease out meaningful relationships.
Prior to joining UNC-Charlotte in 2006, I held the position of professor
in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, The
State University of New York. I was previously affiliated with the
University of Georgia. I am currently the Area Editor in charge
of Geographic Information Science of the new international journal
Networks
and Spatial Economics. From 1996 to 2002, I was the North American
Editor of Papers
in Regional Science, the Journal of the Regional Science Association
International. I have recently assumed the position of Executive
Director of the North
American Regional Science Council.
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