< Grant_McKenzie : Academics /> [space * time / social]
Grant McKenzie is a second year PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Master of Applied Science degree from the University of Melbourne (2008) and an Advanced Diploma in Geographic Information Science from the British Columbia Institute of Technology (2004). During his time in Melbourne, Grant was the recipient of the J H Mirams Memorial Research Scholarship and awarded a Google Doctoral Colloquium Award & Scholarship for promising research proposal at the 2007 Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2007). Prior to starting his PhD, Grant was a founding member of the Seattle based start-up Spatial Development International and worked as a geospatial software developer for the Engineering Consulting firm CH2M Hill. Grant completed his Bachelor of Arts in Geography at the University of British Columbia in 2002.
Articles & Presentations
- McKenzie, G., Raubal, M. (2011) Adding social constraints to location based services. 8th Symposium on Location-Based Services. Vienna, Austria [pdf]
- McKenzie, G. (2011) Determining Social Constraints in Time Geography through Online Social Networking. Conference on Spatial Information Theory 2011 (COSIT) - Doctoral Colloquium. Belfast, ME [pdf]
- McKenzie, G. (2011) Gamification and Location-based Services. Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS Workshop @ COSIT Belfast, ME [pdf]
- Adams, B., McKenzie, G. (2011) Modeling and mapping thematic places. Mapping Place: GIS and the Spatial Humanities Conference. Santa Barbara, USA [pdf abstract]
- Smith, E., McKenzie, G., Duckham, M. (2008) The only game in town. Position Magazine n33 pp. 51-54 [pdf]
- Fennell, C., McKenzie, G., Butler, B. (2008) HarvestChoice: Developing Biblio-spatial Integrations for Search. Digital Library Federation 2008 Spring Forum [pdf slides]
- McKenzie, G. (2007) Exploring the Influence of Landmark Presence and Map Alignment on Wayfinding Performance Using Virtual Environment Modeling Conference on Spatial Information Theory 2007 - Doctoral Colloquium Melbourne, AUS
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Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich (2011)
- GIS III (Prof. Martin Raubal) - Fall 2011
Upper level Geographic Information Science (Webmapping, multiuser spatial databases, mobile GIS)
The University of California, Santa Barbara (2010 - present)
- Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (Prof. Keith Clarke) - Fall 2010
Undergraduate course focused on data manipulation, visualization and organization in GIS. - Geography of Surfing (Prof. Stuart Sweeney) - Winter 2011
Social and physical science concepts manifested in the sport of surfing. Topics include wave generation and forecasting, economics of the surf industry, spatial search, strategic behavior under crowding, territorialism, and the generation/diffusion of regional surf cultures. - Applications in Geographic Information Science (Prof. Keith Clarke) - Spring 2011
Applying GIS theory and techniques to solve problems in land and resource management, utilities, and municipal government.
The University of Melbourne (2006 - 2007)
- Integrated Spatial Systems (Prof. Stephen Winter)
Undergraduate course appling knowledge of fundamental concepts, theory, and applications in core areas of positioning technologies and measurement integration, GIS, distributed spatial computing and mapping, web mapping, and location-based services. - Fundamentals Positioning Technologies (Prof. Allison Kealy)
Undergraduate course exploring different positing technologies, datums and projections. Integration with GIS, remote sensing and spatial analysis.
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Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich
- (2011) Geosocial Networking Research The University of California, Santa Barbara (2010 - present)
- (2010-present) Development and design of Android "Activity" tracking application for UCSB Geography Translab
- (2010) Training and analysis for ethnographic field research with local religious communities (Prof. Mary Hancock, Anthropology) The University of Melbourne (2006 - 2007)
- Wrote C++ Point-in-Polygon code for the "Spatial Information Exploration and Visualization Environment" (an immersive virtual environment developed at the University of Melbourne based on Torque Games Engine code). The code generated multi-point polygon objects populated with a range of random or structured vegetation types. This project involved coding, testing and debugging using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. (Prof. Ian Bishop)
- Creation of mobile game GISnake. GISnake allows spatial enabled mobile users (GPS / GPRS / Wi-Fi enabled smartphones, PDAs & Laptops) to play the popular arcade game Snake in the real world. The project code included use of PHP/Mapscript, Google Maps API, Google Earth, PHP, XML, SVG, JavaScript & MySQL on an Apache webserver. (Prof. Matt Duckham)
- Development of an online portal for tracking meteorological changes around Australia. The project code included use of MapServer, Graph, PHP. (Prof. Allison Kealy)