WEHUB Sessions

Boyan Brodaric is a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada where he works on projects related to the online interoperability of various geoscience information, including groundwater, hazards, and geological mapping. He received his PhD from Penn State University in Geographical Information Science, sits on the board of several journals and conferences, does research on geospatial semantics, and is involved in the development of international geoscience data standards.

Hamish Campbell works for Koordinates (Koordinates.com), based in New Zealand, in a variety of roles, from building business to working on new features. Hamish has a broad background in web and mobile development for GIS in the civil engineering industry. Having been exposed to the data handling practices of central and local authorities, contractors and consultants, Hamish gained a practical understanding of the challenges every organization faces in geodata storage, discovery and distribution. Through Koordinates, Hamish has helped solve these difficult problems, and his company aims to be ‘the one place for geodata’.

Tosha Comendant joined the Conservation Biology Institute in March of 2008 as a Senior Conservation Scientist. She currently leads a team developing a web-based conservation data and information sharing system, called Data Basin, which provides data about complex ecological, political, and economic systems. Prior to joining CBI, Comendant was a member of the lead science team at The Nature Conservancy based in Arlington, VA. She was also the editor in 2007 of The Science Chronicles, a monthly publication for science-minded conservationists. She received her PhD from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz, where she studied life history evolution in lizards. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology.

Terence Gannon, Founder and President at Intellog Inc
, launched his first start-up in the 1980’s, bringing two word processing programs to the nascent personal computer market. He has since served stints at North Canadian Oils, Norcen, Sceptre Resources, Canadian Fracmaster and Trican Well Services, where he pioneered the use of ultralight business process management tools to increase productivity, and reduce missed or duplicated work. In 2008 Gannon launched Intellog Inc. with the mandate of bringing current generation web-based applications and data integration tools to the oil and gas industry. He regularly campaigns for the petroleum industry to open up its public data stores to be free and widely available to all stakeholders.

Herb Lainchbury is a strategist in open data, technology, information management and privacy. He is president of Dynamic Solutions Inc., a firm providing web consulting, design and delivery services to private and public sector clients. He created Waterly.ca, an app to increase awareness around responsible household lawn water use, for BC’s 2010 Apps for Climate Action contest. It won in both the Best of B.C. and Best of the Web categories. Lainchbury is also the founder of OpenDataBC, a grass roots community dedicated to promoting the understanding and use of open data in British Columbia. Over the course of his 25+ year career, he has served the province of British Columbia both as a government employee and as an engaged citizen and public service advocate. Lainchbury holds a degree in computer science from the University of Victoria.

Denis Lepage, Senior Scientist at Bird Studies Canada, has been passionate about birds his entire life. What began as a birdwatching hobby in his childhood has developed into a career focused on designing birding databases. Lepage finished a PhD in ornithology at Laval University (Québec City) in 1997, investigating the reproductive success of Snow Geese in the Artctic. From 1998 to 2000, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of Ornithology, University of Cape Town, in South Africa. There, he was involved in a variety of projects about the evolution of life-history strategies in birds (such as variations in clutch size in relation to the environment), and cooperative breeding in Red-billed (or Green) Woodhoopoes. Lepage is co-developer of the Avian Knowledge Network, a portal that provides general information on the dynamics of bird populations, as well as data and analysis resources for scientific research.

David McChesney is a native Albertan with over 27 years experience in the information technology industry working for the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Intergraph and Petro-Soft, primarily in the Calgary marketplace.  He has taken his lifelong love of maps to his current role as District Manager of ESRI Canada for the Prairies Region out of Calgary, providing mapping and geospatial solutions to both the public and private sectors and leveraging a team of over 300 professionals across Canada.

Bob Phillips became Executive Director of the South East Alberta Watershed Alliance (SEAWA) in 2008. Prior to joining SEAWA, Phillips was an international management consultant specializing in senior management performance, with clients in Canada, California, Nevada, Utah, Washington and Hawaii. With training in business administration and an interest in conservation and development, he also founded several ecotourism companies. He represents SEAWA with the Alberta WPACs and was part of the Alberta Water Council’s Moving from Words to Actions project team. During the summer you can find him at the family cottage sailing or hiking the Qu’Appelle Valley and Cransley at Last Mountain Lake with his two duck tolling retrievers.

Christine Robson is a researcher at IBM Research- Almaden, currently working on a mobile crowdsourcing project called Creek Watch. She is also a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, where she is advised by Marti Hearst. Her research is focused on the utility and quality of crowdsourced data, including both primary use data (such as voluntarily-submitted citizen science data), and secondary use data (such as data scraped from blogs and social networking sites). Christine received her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at MIT, where she studied mathematics and computer science. In 2004 she was hired by the IBM Tokyo Research Lab, and has been working for IBM Research ever since.

Mike Scarth is the Co-Founder of Alberta WaterSMART, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the improvement of water management awareness, technologies and practices. Mike is also Executive Director of the Alberta WaterPortal project. Prior to becoming involved with WaterSMART, he worked in the venture capital and technology industry in a variety of roles focusing on marketing, regulations, financial analysis, mergers and acquisitions, strategic planning, and project management. Mike holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Alberta, and is a graduate of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. He is also an alumni member of Canada’s Olympic, Commonwealth, Pan Am and World Championship Swim Teams.

Shahram Yassemi is the founder and developer of Geokov.com, a web application for map-making and integration of spatial data to support such applications as environmental and resource management, conservation, disaster management, search and rescue, education, and backcountry recreation. He has worked as a GIS technician for Public Works and Government Services Canada, a forestry and agriculture research technician at the University of Idaho, a silvi-culture technician and as a ski instructor. Shahram’s academic background includes mathematics, agroforestry and GIS, with a MSc. degree in geography (GIS) from Simon Fraser University.