Basic Information
  • Brent Hecht
  • Ph.D. Student in Computer Science and Independent GIScientist
  • Northwestern University
  • Evanston, IL

Research Interests

Education
  • Culture and HCI
  • Mining Cultural Diversity
  • Culturally Aware Applications
  • Geography and HCI
  • Information Retrieval
  • Semantic Relatedness
  • User-Generated Content (UGC)
  • Volunteered Geographic Info. PDF Icon
  • GIScience / Geography
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Geovisualization / Info Viz
  • Location-based Services
  • 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)
  • CHI 2010: Hecht, B. and Gergle, D. The Tower of Babel Meets Web 2.0: User-Generated Content and its Applications in a Multilingual Context. 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Atlanta, GA (pdf).
  • CSCW 2010: Hecht, B. and Gergle, D. On The "Localness" of User-Generated Content. 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Savannah, Georgia, USA. (pdf)
  • Book Chapter: Hecht, B. and Gergle, D. A Beginner’s Guide to Geographic Virtual Communities Research. Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena. Ed: Daniel, Ben K. IGI Global. 2010. (preprint pdf)
  • COSIT 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, Springer-Verlag, L'Aber Wrac'h, France, 88 - 105. Winner: Best Presentation. (pdf)
  • C&T 2009: Hecht, B. and Gergle, D. Measuring Self-Focus Bias in Community-Maintained Knowledge Repositories. Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies, University Park, PA, USA, 2009. (pdf)
  • Book Entry: Hecht, B. Data Indexing. in Warf, B. ed. The Encyclopedia of Geography, SAGE, 2009.
  • GIScience 2008 EA: Hecht, B. and Schöning, J. Mapping the Zeitgeist. Miller, H. and Cova, T. eds. 5th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (Extended Abstract). Park City, Utah. United States, 2008. Winner: Best Extended Abstract. (pdf)
  • AGILE 2008: 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. (pdf)
  • IUI 2008: 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, ACM, Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008, 129-138. (pdf)
  • CHI 2008 EA: Schöning, J., Hecht, B. and Starosielski, N. Evaluating automatically generated location-based stories for tourists. 26th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, ACM, Florence, Italy, 2008. (pdf)
  • AAAI Fall Symposium 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. (pdf)
  • PERMID Workshop 2007: 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. (pdf)
  • UbiComp 2007 EA: 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. (pdf)
  • Pervasive 2007 LBR: 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. (pdf)

Theses