Dr. Stephen C. Hirtle is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint appointment in the Intelligent Systems Program. He directs the Spatial Information Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh, which conducts research on the structure of cognitive maps, navigation in real and virtual spaces, and computational models for spatial cognition. Dr. Hirtle was the founding co-editor of Spatial Cognition and Computation and past president of the Classification Society of North America. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal Geographical Information Science. In addition, Dr. Hirtle has had visiting appointments in Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, Computer Science at Molde College in Norway, the Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and Geoinformatics at the University of Augsburg in Germany. He hosted the first North American meeting of International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT97), in the Laurel Highlands, outside of Pittsburgh, PA, in October of 1997 and co-chaired the NCGIA Varenius Panel on ""Cognitive Models of Dynamic Phenomena and Their Representations"" in October of 1998 with Alan MacEachren. He has also served on the Board of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.