This page contains information about a variety of projects I am, or was, involved in, as well as links to various organisations.
My research focuses on two areas - environmental modelling and Geographic Information Retrieval. I have been involved in, at various levels, in a variety of funded (and unfunded) projects in these areas. The TopIce project focuses on the influence of terrain representation on large-scale environmental modelling and its contribution to uncertainty of model results. The TopIce project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. SPIRIT (Spatially-Aware Information Retrieval on the Internet) focused on the development of a spatially aware search engine, and was funded under the IST programme of the European Commission. Project Tripod is also funded under the IST programme of the European Commission, and will investigate the automatic captioning of images, based on their locations. While in Edinburgh, I was involved in a long-running programme of research investigating paleo-climate change in Patagonia, through a variety of techniques. My contribution was mostly related to the use of ice-sheet models to examine potential climatic scenarios. You can find out more about this project here. I am a strong believer in delivering high-quality teaching in universities, and was involved in the e-MapScholar project, which sought to develop innovative and customisable methods for the production of GIScience related online learning materials.
My PhD research was related to snow and avalanches in Scotland, and since then I have continued some research work,in this area. I am a member of the Snow and Avalanche Foundation of Scotland (SAFOS), an organisation which gives advice on the provision of avalanche forecasts (delivered by the sportScotland Avalanche Information Service) in Scotland and organises events related to avalanche education, together with encouraging avalanche research in Scotland. You can find references to my publications in this area on the publications page.
This year's GIR workshop will take place in conjunction with CIKM in Napa Valley in November - you can find out about the workshop here. Together with Chris Jones, I have been chaired four workshops on Geographic Information Retrieval. The first took place in conjunction with SIGIR 2004 in Sheffield, whilst the second was part of CIKM in Bremen in 2005. The third workshop took place in in conjunction with SIGIR 2006 in Seattle and the fourth with CIKM 2007 in Lisbon. As well as the proceedings resulting from these workshops, Chris and I have edited a special issue of Computers, Environment and Urban Systems(you can navigate from our editorial to the other articles in the special issue) on Geographic Information Retrieval - and a special issue of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science.
In Edinburgh and Zurich I have supervised a number of Master's and PhD students. My intention is to put a list here, together with links to their theses where they are online.
Ross Purves
Department of Geography
University of Zurich - Irchel
Winterthurerstrasse 190
8057 Zurich
Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0)44 635 6531
Fax: +41 (0)44 635 6848
E-mail: ross.purvesATgeo.uzh.ch
N.B Please replace AT with @.
