Presidential Report from Mei-Po Kwan

Title Presidential Report from Mei-Po Kwan
Date 2015-10-31
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From: Mei-Po Kwan <mpk654@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 10:43 AM
Subject: My last day as CPGIS President

Dear all,

 

My one-year term as CPGIS President officially ends today. During the past year, I truly enjoyed working with members of CPGIS’s Board of Directors (BOD), CPGIS’s General Secretary Shuming Bao, and many other members. I am grateful to their collegiality and outstanding service to the association. But most of all, I am grateful to all of you for your kind support, which enabled the CPGIS to achieve many accomplishments in the past year. These include:

 

(1) Together with China University of Geoscience, we held a highly successful Geoinformatics 2015 conference in Wuhan in June 2015. The meeting featured many distinguished keynote speakers including Academicians Deren Li, Guanhua Xu, Chenghu Zhou, Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Douglas Richardson, and other distinguished scholars Gruen Armin, Zhihong Sun, and Shaowen Wang. The conference attracted more than 250 high-quality paper presentations. It included several very successful student paper competition sessions. Two special plenary sessions on “Frontiers in GIS” were organized by Shuming Bao. A special panel session on “Women in GIS” was organized byChuanrong Zhang (Chair of our Supporting Women in GIS Committee). The conference proceedings will be published by IEEE and will be EI indexed.

 

(2) In June 2015 we sponsored a high-level Health GIS Forum in Wuhan. Bing Xu and Academician Jianya Gong kindly organized the forum, which was very successful.

 

(3) We sponsored and helped organize a 60-session Symposium on International Geospatial Health Research at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) 2015 conference in Chicago, Illinois, April 21-25. With about 300 paper/panel presentations, the 4-day Symposium was a tremendous success. The symposium explored new research frontiers in geospatial health research and foster international networks to share this information across borders and generate research synergies. It was sponsored by the AAG, the International Geospatial Health Research Network, the AAG Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG), and the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences (CPGIS).

 

(4) Led by Chair of our Go Home Committee Shixiong Hu, we held our 2015 CPGIS Go Home Project in Kuming and Guiyang in June 2015. The project seeks to encourage academic and professional exchanges between domestic and overseas Chinese GIS professionals through advanced GIS seminars and follow-up discussion held in selected universities and research institutes in China.

 

(5) Thanks to the efforts of our Conference Site Selection Committee (Wei Luo as Chair), we selected the Ryan Institute GIS Centre at the National University of Ireland, Galway to host the Geoinformatics 2016 Conference in Galway, Ireland. 

 

(6) We awarded honorary membership to two GIS scholars to recognize their outstanding scholarship and international reputation in the field of GIScience: Luc Anselin (member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, Arizona State University), and Huadong Guo (Academician, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Currently, Honorary Members of the CPGIS include Mike Batty, Jack Dangermond, Mike Goodchild, Deren Li, and Guanhua Xu. We are pleased to add two outstanding members to such a distinguished group of honorary members.

 

(7) As editor of our journal Annals of GIS, Hui Lin continues to undertake various activities to promote the journal (e.g., announcing the latest contents of the journals) and citations of the articles published in the journal. We are working to have the journal indexed by SCI.

 

(8) I contributed an entry on the CPGIS in the International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. This is a monumental major reference which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell.

 

(9) We established a new CPGIS Distinguished Scholar Award to recognize CPGIS members for outstanding research contributions to geographic information sciences/systems, remote sensing, and related fields. It is managed by the CPGIS Awards Committee.

 

(10) We established a new CPGIS Awards Committee to centrally coordinate all award activities of the CPGIS. It replaces our former Service Awards Committee. The new Awards Committee is responsible for running and/or coordinating the following CPGIS awards annually, including nomination and issuing award certificates or plaques: (1) the CPGIS Service Excellence Award; (2) the CPGIS Distinguished Scholar Award; (3) the Education Excellence Award; and (4) the CPGIS Life-Time Achievement Award. I thank Chuanrong Zhang (University of Connecticut) for kindly agreeing to serve as Chair of this new Awards Committee.

 

(11) Thanks to the work of our 2014-15 awards committees (especially their chairs Aijun Chen, Pinde Fu, and Xiang Chen), the following 9 persons received various CPGIS awards. Award recipients who attended the Geoinformatics 2015 meeting also received their award certificates at the conference in Wuhan.

 

  • CPGIS 2015 Distinguished Scholar Award: Hui Lin (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Xia Li (Sun Yat-Sen University)
  • CPGIS 2015 Service Excellence Individual Award: Xun Shi (Dartmouth College)
  • CPGIS 2015 Excellence in Education Award: Fahui Wang (Louisiana State University), and Naixia Mou (Shandong University of Science and Technology)
  • Geoinformatics 2015 Student Paper Competition Awards: (1) First Place: Shuli Chen (Beijing Normal University, China); (2) Second Place: Chang Ren (Wuhan University, China); and (3) Third Place: Yifan Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China), and Mo Wang (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

 

(12) Xiang Chen was appointed the new chair of our Student Paper Competition Committee, which has four other members: Le Wang, Qinghua Guo, Xiaobai Yao, and Xinyue Ye. Chen organized and ran several highly successful student paper competition sessions at the Geoinformatics 2015 conference.

 

(13) Xuelian Meng was appointed the new chair of our Social Events Committee. She organized a well-attended CPGIS business meeting and a highly successful CPGIS Get-together Dinner at the AAG Annual meeting in Chicago in April 2015. AAG had kindly sponsored this event and over 100 people attended the dinner gathering.

 

(14) Kai Cao was appointed the new chair of our Newsletter Editorial Committee, which is responsible for collecting, compiling, and releasing newsletter to report CPGIS-related events and members’ achievements.

 

(15) We established the position of AAG Liaison, who is responsible for (a) assisting CPGIS to communicate or cooperate with the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in its various activities (e.g., CPGIS¹s business meeting held at the AAG annual meeting); (b) assisting CPGIS in obtaining sponsorship for specific activities or developing joint events with the AAG; and (c) representing CPGIS in AAG matters or activities that concern CPGIS¹s interest. After deliberation by CPGIS’s Board of Directors, I was appointed this position.

 

(16) We are in the process of drafting guidelines and forming a finance/endowment committee to oversee and manage CPGIS’s asset (excluding the operating budget). After deliberation by CPGIS’s Board of Directors, Xun Shi is now in charge of this process.

 

(17) Starting 2015-2016, we will include student members in CPGIS’s Board of Directors in order to better reflect students’ concerns and needs in CPGIS’s business and activities.

 

(18) We sent our condolence to Beijing Normal University to express our sympathy and sadness about the passing away of Professor Xiaowen Li. Thanks to Hui Lin and Anrong Dang for drafting the condolence.

 

These accomplishments and the day-to-day operation of our headquarters (e.g., updating our website) would be impossible without the time and efforts of many capable and talented CPGIS members, including our General Secretary Shuming Bao, our BOD members, committee chairs, and committee members. For instance, Edwin Chow and our Election Committee is capably leading/working on the 2015-2016 CPGIS election (please vote by November 2). I sincerely thank all of them for their kind support and selfless dedication to the association.

 

Our new president Shixiong Hu will take office tomorrow. Shixiong has served in various capacities for CPGIS for many years (e.g., the Go Home Project). He is Vice President of CPGIS and member of the BOD in the past year. He has been and is currently working diligently on the Geoinformatics 2016 conference. I have no doubt that CPGIS will continue to accomplish many great things under his leadership.

 

My experience as CPGIS President has been truly wonderful. I had opportunities in working with and learning from many of you. I will continue to serve CPGIS through my roles in the BOD and in several committees. I look forward to working with you in the future.

 

Best wishes,

Mei-Po

 

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Mei-Po Kwan  关美宝

Professor

Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

Champaign, IL 61820, USA

 

President, CPGIS (https://cpgis.org/)

Editor, Annals of the Association of American Geographers

 

mpk654@gmail.com

http://meipokwan.org

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