ABOUT ME
I view the world through a computer. I am always looking to improve the view.
Eric Shook is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.
Dr. Shook's research combines geographic information science and computational science in an area called geospatial computing.
Conceptually, this research examines the underpinnings of geographic information science by exploiting spatial and temporal relationships
to enable spatio-temporal models and analytic methods to leverage advanced computing technologies.
Practically, these models and methods push the computational envelope providing new capabilities for multiple environmental and social science domains.
Ultimately, this is a co-design process where geospatial problems drive computing advances and new computing capabilities enhance the ways we can tackle geospatial problems.
Eric Shook
He is Associate Chair of the Department of Geography, Environment and Society and Co-Director of the professional Master of GIScience program.
He is leading the creation of a new collaborative hub for geospatial research, education, and public engagement called the GeoCommons.
He also serves as Vice-Chair of Education for the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science
and Domain Champion for GIS for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).
Dr. Shook also focuses his attention on education and workforce development.
He teaches in the areas of GIScience, geospatial computing, geospatial data science, and geoAI.
He is the PI of a National Science Foundation (NSF) project called the Hour of Cyberinfrastructure (Hour of CI)
that aims to help hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students build cyber literacy for GIScience one hour at a time (hourofci.org).
He is the Co-lead of the Education and Workforce Development group for the NSF-supported Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment
(I-GUIDE).
I am really good at:
GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science)
Coding
Communicating
Scalable Computing
I am fortunate to have:
PROJECTS
A small list of projects.
I-GUIDE
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) aims to transform geospatial data-intensive sciences through integration of AI and cyberGIS, reproducible data-intensive analytics and modeling, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles, and innovative education and workforce development programs.
I am Co-Lead of the Education and Workforce Development team with Mohan Ramamurthy and I am also on the Geospatial AI and Data Science team.
(
iguide.illinois.edu)
Hour of CI
The Hour of Cyberinfrastructure (Hour of CI) is a nationwide campaign introducing hundreds of diverse undergraduate and graduate students
to cyberinfrastructure and geographic information science (GIScience) while building Cyber Literacy for GIScience.
The NSF-supported project is developing 17 interactive, online lessons for students and creating supplementary curriculum materials for instructors.
I am Principal Investigator (PI) of the Hour of CI project.
(
hourofci.org)
ForEST Programming Language
ForEST is a domain-specific language FOR Expressing Spatial-Temporal (FOREST) computation (
github.com).
Essentially, for GIScientists ForEST makes it easy to parallelize spatial-temporal computing using Python as the host language.
ForEST builds off an earlier language called the Parallel Cartographic Modeling Language (PCML).
ForEST demonstrated to me that we do not fully understand how to operationalize geospatial computing,
which has led to a third skunkworks project that I am developing now under the Warwick Mid-Career Faculty Research Award
(
Award Page).
EveryField
EveryField is an ambitious project aiming to map every crop field in the world using satellite imagery.
Covid disrupted the trajectory of this research, but it continues making progress by building on Jesse Bakker's MA thesis work.
