Simon Scheider is an Associate Professor of GIS in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, Netherlands. His research focuses on conceptual modeling, geographic data analysis, and knowledge extraction. He is particularly interested in the concepts underlying spatio-temporal data鈥攕uch as reference systems, fields, spatial objects, processes and events, and trajectories鈥攁nd in practical methods for modeling them using GIS, geospatial semantics and automated text analysis (NLP). Another key focus is leveraging knowledge representation and AI to support geographic analysis, enable meaningful geographic statistics, and to better understand the validity of spatio-temporal modeling. He holds a Ph.D. in Geoinformatics (2012) from the University of Muenster, Germany. From 2002 to 2008, he was a research assistant at the Fraunhofer IAIS in Germany in the area of spatial data mining, before taking on a Ph.D. position in Muenster. He later held postdoctoral positions at UC Santa Barbara, Muenster, and ETH Zurich. He joined Utrecht as an Assistant Professor in 2016, received tenure in 2018, and became Associate Professor in 2024. In 2018, Simon was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on geographic question answering (geoQA), in which we developed the idea of indirect, geo-analytical QA. Since 2020, he has been leading parts of the NWO-funded Exposome-NL project on simulating the effects of urban policy interventions on the exposure and health of citizens. Since 2023 he has been a member of the executive board of the project which includes more than 50 researchers. In 2024, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant on automatic, indirect geoQA using geo-analytical transformations of various sources of geodata available in map repositories. He has been a member of the AGILE council since 2021, and of the steering committee of the conference on spatial information theory (COSIT) since 2023, co-organizing AGILE 2023 as well as COSIT 2024.
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