Gary Hunter

Associate Professor and Reader

Teaching

Land Law, Cadastral Surveying and Land Development, Introduction to GIS, Management of GIS

Research

The treatment of data quality and uncertainty in spatial information, spatial data usability

Biography

Gary Hunter came to academia in 1988 after 17 years in industry, and his experience includes engineering construction, cadastral, and topographic mapping projects in Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

In 1990 he was the first lecturer appointed in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at the University of Melbourne, and is now an Associate Professor and Reader in the Department of Geomatics.

In 1993 he spent 7 months as a Visiting Researcher at the National Centre for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 1994 gained his PhD from the University of Melbourne on the subject of managing uncertainty in spatial databases.

During the last 17 years he has authored or co-authored over 140 refereed journal papers, book chapters, monographs and conference papers.

He has been awarded the North American Horwood Critique Prize for the best research papers at the URISA '93, '95 and '99 conferences in Atlanta, San Antonio and Chicago; the Gerald McCalden Prize for the best research papers at the AURISA '90 and '94 conferences; the 1993 AISIST Award for the outstanding academic in GIS in Australasia; and the 1996 ASPRS Intergraph Award for the best scientific paper published in the Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing journal during 1995. Four of these prizes have been in conjunction with Professor Mike Goodchild for their work dealing with spatial data quality.

He is the Asia/Australia editor of "Transactions in GIS" and a section editor for the "URISA Journal". He also serves on the editorial boards of the "International Journal of Geographical Information Science" and "GeoInformatica", and sits on the Jury Panel for the Exemplary Systems in Government prize awarded by URISA.

In 1996 he served as President of the Australasian Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (AURISA), and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Spatial Sciences Institute in Australia in 2004. He was the academic appointee to the Surveyors Board of Victoria for the period 1997-2001, and is currently serving on the new Surveyors Registration Board of Victoria for the period 2005-2007.

In 2006 he was inducted into the URISA GIS Hall of Fame