Curriculum Vitae

Contact

• Office

  109 Park Hall, North Campus University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150

• Email

  bittner3@buffalo.edu

• ORCID

  0000-0003-4204-1532

Education

• 1999

  Ph.D., Geo-Informatics Department of Geo-Informatics, Technical University of Vienna, Austria.
  Thesis: Rough Location. Advisors: Andrew U. Frank and Thomas Eiter.

• 1989

  Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.), Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Leipzig, Germany.
  Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Dynamic Data Structure for 3D Computational Modeling and Visualization in Electrical Engineering. Advisors: Dieter Herden and Werner Tischer.

Appointments

• Present

  Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Geography University at Buffalo, State University of New York

• 2005

  Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Geography University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Appointed June 2005.

• 2002-2005

  Senior Research Scientist Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), Saarland University, Germany

• 2000-2002

  Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Computer and Information Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in Ken Forbus's Qualitative Reasoning Group. Part of DARPA's Rapid Knowledge Formation project.

• 1999-2000

  Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen's University at Kingston, and Department of Geo-Informatics, Laval University, Quebec City, Canada. Canadian GEOID project.

• 1998

  Visiting Research Fellow National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Maine, Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, Orono

• 1996-1999

  Research Assistant Department of Geo-Informatics, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

Concurrent research appointments

Research appointments as documented in April 2009.

• Appointed 2006

  Research Scientist National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA)

• Appointed 2005

  Research Scientist New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences

Areas of specialization and competence

• Specialization

  Formal and applied ontology; ontology of space, time, and spatial entities; spatio-temporal reasoning; biomedical ontology; geographic information science; logic.

• Competence

  Geo-, medical, and bio-informatics; theories of uncertainty and vagueness; artificial intelligence; quantum information theory.

Teaching

• Philosophy

  Logic; Spatial Ontology Graduate seminars (2003) in mereology (axiomatic theories of the part-of and connectedness relations) and topics in ontology (formal ontology of geographic space, ontology of space and time).

• Geography

  GEO 481/506 Introduction to Geographical Information Systems; GEO 488/556 GIS Design; GEO 595 Database Design for GIS; GEO 655 Advanced Topics in Geographic Information Systems

• 2008

  Invited course, Formal-ontologische Prinzipien für Handlungen in der Wissensrepräsentation Department of Philosophy, Paderborn University, Germany. Supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

• 2004

  Course, Ontology and Semantic Interoperability International Summer School, Canadian GEOID network

Service

Service as documented in April 2009, except where a later date is given.

• To 2027

  Member, College of Arts and Sciences Policy Committee, University at Buffalo Philosophy representative; term ending June 30, 2027.

• Editorial

  Associate Editor, Earth Science Informatics Editorial Board Member, The Open Medical Informatics Journal

• Review

  Reviewer of nominations for the Canada Research Chairs Program; reviewer of research proposals for the Canadian GEOID network.

• Refereeing

  Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence · Applied Ontology · Artificial Intelligence · Erkenntnis · Fundamenta Informaticae · IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics · International Journal of Geographical Information Science · ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing · Journal of Applied Logic · Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research · Journal of Visual Languages and Computing · Professional Geographer · Spatial Cognition and Computation · Synthese

• 2000 - 2009

  Program and reviewing committee member for COSIT, FLAIRS (Spatiotemporal Reasoning track), GIScience, TIME-ICTL, AGILE, AISB, MIE, and the AAAI Spring Symposium on Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, among others. Tutorial organizer, An Introduction to Formal Ontology and How It Can Facilitate Semantic Interoperability, COSIT 2005, Ellicottville, New York.

• Supervision

  Dissertation and master's committee member Alexandre Sorokine, Gaurav Sina, Christopher Brehme, and Heath E. Robinson (Ph.D.), and Benjamin D. Kamphaus (M.S.), Department of Geography, University at Buffalo.

Selected invited presentations

As documented in April 2009.

• 2008

  Qualitative geometries for medical knowledge representation Kolloquium zur Philosophie, Paderborn University, Germany

• 2007

  The qualitative spatial relations in bio-ontologies Dagstuhl Seminar, Towards Interoperability of Biomedical Ontologies

• 2007

  Spatio-temporal ontologies for the semantic discovery of geo-resources Workshop on Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructures, Welsh eScience Centre, Cardiff University

• 2006

  A theory of granular parthood based on qualitative cardinality and size measures Buffalo Logic Colloquium

• 2006

  A mereological theory of frames of reference Transregional Collaborative Research Center Spatial Cognition, Bremen University

• 2005

  Approximate qualitative temporal reasoning Dagstuhl Seminar 05151, Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events