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Cultivating Spatial Intelligence

Paul Cote: Geographic Information Systems Specialist

Paul & his plane table alidade	Who am I and what am I doing here?

Resume Updated March 18 2013

I work at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My fundamental activity is to help people to use and organize information: to gain better understanding of places and they way they work; to make models that will help to understand proposed changes in places; and to create effective presentations of these ideas. In all of this, I stress the importance of understanding and communicating the biases and limits inherent in models and their components. Furthermore in all of this, it is imperative that the information, procedures and models that we compile and create should be properly organized so that they may be easily understood, tested, reused and built upon by our collaborators, critics and successors. Below, I organize links to some of this work:

• I document GIS resources for GSD students
  • New! A Cybernetic View of Studio
  • I am trying to organize the information residue of GSD Studios and Place-Based Research.
  • An Urban Design Laboratory for Belfast U.K.
  • The Harvard Design School's Three-Tiered Approach to School-wide Geographic Information Systems Support
  • MCP: Tools for creating portable GIS Metadata Catalogs.
• I have served as the Architect of the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Services Testbed for CAD, GIS and Building Information Models.
  • Web Services Architecture for CAD GIS and BIM An official Open Geospatial Consortium Discussion Paper.
• I'm creating and documenting applications of new tools that the public to can use understand develop and share planning proposals:
  • Information Ecology in the Garden at Dumbarton Oaks
  • The Virtual City Collective
  • The Google Earth Train Set
  • Green Line Station Modeling Workshop
• I'm developing ways to organize large three dimensional models of cities that can represent different temporal and alternative design scenarios:
  • Virtual Cities as Public Infrastructure
  • A Simple Data Model for Managing Large, Dynamic City Models Funded by the Town of Brookline.
  • A Database Infrastructure for Collaboratively Built, Metropolitan-Scale Detailed Urban Models
  • Metropolitan Scale Models of Boston and New York City A practical framework for a collaboratively developed, multi-purpose 3d model of the metropolis
  • Understanding and Protecting Visual Connectivity in Urban Landscapes
• I collaborate with other staff and faculty
  • Discovering the Topology of Segregation
  • Slides from a presentation of lessons learned in managing data for the Camp Pendleton Biodiversity Study.
• Courses I've taught
  • Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems
  • Site Representation and Analysis
  • Virtual Worlds as Public Infrastructure
• I Dabble in Cartography:
  • A Study of GSD Student Shuttle Access
  • Combating Traffic Congestion with Exploratory Data Analysis
  • Looking at Demographic Change Near the Portland, Oregon Metro Growth Boundary
• Free! GSD related graphics:
  • Take a tour of Gund Hall in Google Earth!
  • GSD Locator Maps!
  • Full Color GSD Shield!
  • A very short powerpoint about the GSD as a Representation Engine.