Contact Info
  • Brent Hecht
  • Ph.D. Student in Computer Science and Independent GIScientist
  • Northwestern University
  • Evanston, IL
  • email:
  • office: CollaboLab
  • Frances Searle Bldg. #2-419
  • 2240 Campus Drive
  • Northwestern University
  • Evanston, IL 60208
  • USA

Research Interests

Education
  • Application and Study of Hyperlingual Datasets
  • Semantic Relatedness
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Community Technologies
  • Information Retrieval
  • Web 2.0 Geography
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Geovisualization
  • Location-based Services
  • Geospatial Data Mining
  • Wikipedia
  • Volunteered Geographic Info. PDF Icon
  • Web Knowledge Repositories
  • Geography and Narrative Theory
  • Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science (beginning Fall 2008). Northwestern University.
  • Master of Arts in Geography. University of California, Santa Barbara. December 2007.
  • Visiting Scholar. Universität Münster. October 2006 - February 2007.
  • Bachelor of Arts Honors in Computer Science. Macalester College (magna cum laude). May 2005.
  • Bachelor of Arts Honors in Geography. Macalester College (magna cum laude). May 2005.

 

Recent Refereed Publications (and CV PDF)

2009

  • Hecht, B and Moxley, E. Terabytes of Tobler: Evaluating the First Law in a Massive, Domain-Neutral Representation of World Knowledge. Ninth International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT '09), Aber Wrac'h, France (to appear) (Download PDF)
  • Hecht, B. and Gergle, D. Measuring Self-Focus Bias in Community-Maintained Knowledge Repositories. Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies (Communities and Technologies 2009), University Park, PA, USA, 2009 (to appear) (Download PDF)
  • Hecht, B. Data Indexing. in Warf, B. ed. The Encyclopedia of Geography, SAGE, 2009.

2008

  • Hecht, B. and Schöning, J. Mapping the Zeitgeist. Miller, H. and Cova, T. eds. 5th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (Extended Abstract) (GIScience 2008 Extended Abstracts), Park City, Utah. United States, 2008. Winner: Best Extended Abstract. (Download PDF)
  • Hecht, B. and Raubal, M. GeoSR: Geographically explore semantic relations in world knowledge. Bernard, L., Friis-Christensen, A. and Pundt, H. eds. 11th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Springer-Verlag, Girona, Spain, 2008, 95 - 114. (Download PDF)
  • Schöning, J., Hecht, B., Raubal, M., Krüger, A., Marsh, M. and Rohs, M. Improving interaction with virtual globes through spatial thinking: Helping users ask "why?" 13th International Confererence on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2008), ACM, Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008, 129-138. (Download PDF)
  • Schöning, J., Hecht, B. and Starosielski, N. Evaluating automatically generated location-based stories for tourists. CHI 2008 Extended Abstracts, ACM, Florence, Italy, 2008. (Download PDF)

2007

  • Hecht, B., Starosielski, N. and Dara-Abrams, D. Generating Educational Tourism Narratives from Wikipedia. Magerko, B., Riedl, M., Loyall, B., Young, R.M. and Mateas, M. eds. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (AAAI-INT07), AAAI, Arlington, VA, USA, 2007, 37-44. (Download PDF)
  • Hecht, B., Rohs, M., Schöning, J. and Krüger, A. Using Magic Lenses to Explore Georeferenced Wikipedia Content. Rukzio, E., Hakkila, J., Ballagas, R., Wilson, A. and Reilly, D. eds. 3rd International Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID 07) at Pervasive 2007, Toronto, Canada, 2007, 6-10. (Download PDF)
  • Schöning, J., Hecht, B., Rohs, M. and Starosielski, N. WikEar - Automatically Generated Location-Based Audio Stories Between Public City Maps. 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Demo Proceedings), ACM, Innsbruck, Austria, 2007. (Download PDF)
  • Rohs, M., Schöning, J., Krüger, A. and Hecht, B. Towards Realtime Markerless Tracking of Magic Lenses on Paper Maps. 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Late-Breaking Results) (Pervasive 2007 LBR), Toronto, Canada, 2007, 69-72. (Download PDF)

Theses