The Geofutures Expert Panel

The Geofutures Expert Panel enables the practice to offer clients unmatched access to industry-leading GI expertise. Spanning the blue-chip commercial, academic and government sectors, the Panel members combine a wealth of practical experience and relevant knowledge.

The Panel meets regularly with Geofutures colleagues both to discuss approaches to specific client work and to share ideas on the industry-wide development of technologies, statistical and modelling methods.

Dave Unwin

Until his retirement in 2004, and after a short spell as a Director of the UK eUniversity, Dave Unwin was Professor of Geography at Birkbeck College, University of London where he taught Geographic Information Science and Environmental Science. He retains an Emeritus Chair in Geography at Birkbeck and is Visiting Professor in Geomatic Engineering at UCL. His research concerns spatial statistical analysis and visualisation, particularly in environmental applications.

Dave Unwin was a pioneer in the UK in the application of computing to geographical problems and to geographical education. In 1989 he was the founding Director of the Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Geography and has served on various committees of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) and the Geographical Association. He was also a Council and Management Committee member of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI). His work for the AGI led to the establishment of a Continuing Professional Development programme for the GI industry, winning him the AGI’s Past President’s Prize for services to the Association in 1999. From 2001-2003 he was also a member of a USA National Academy of Science Panel on Beyond Mapping.

Dave has led or co-led a number of GI-related research projects, and was assistant director of the (UK) Economic and Social Research Council’s Midland’s Regional Research Laboratory at Leicester University where many of the ideas behind the modelling of population using continuous surfaces were first developed.

With support from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee he has developed tools for the visualisation of geographic data (see http://www.mimas.ac.uk/argus/), for use in the development of virtual field courses (see http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/vfc/), and for the characterisation of urban surfaces in physically meaningful terms for input into urban climate models. He has published a number of standard-setting books and papers. Dave has also recently won the 2006 UCGIS Educator Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science.

Martin Callingham

Martin’s interest in this field began during his career in market research, which followed earlier work as a research scientist for Unilever. Moving from a research agency to Whitbread, he became Group Market Research Director running the Market Research, Spatial Analysis and Direct Marketing departments. He was also a non-executive director of Whitbread’s German operation.

He has been an active member of the market research industry, having been a Council Member and Chairman of the Association of Users of Market Research (AURA), and more recently a Council Member of the European Society (ESOMAR). He is a Fellow of the Market Research Society, and is currently on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Market Research and is a member of the Awards and Publications Committees of the Market Research Society. He has published a book, Market Intelligence, and for some time he served as a non-executive director of the research agency Market Research Solutions Limited.

Martin has long been interested in developing thinking on the application of spatial methods to site selection and other business areas. He was a Council Member of the Association of Geographic Information (AGI), and won the best paper at the 1996 Conference on the application of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) to business situations.

Currently he is continuing to develop these ideas as a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is especially interested in new areal classifications (particularly utilising Neighbourhood Statistics and geographical primitives) and the potential implicit information in all types of flow data. He is an honorary member of the Demographic Users Group (DUG) which he helped to found, and a member of the Business Advisory Group (BAG) for the 2001 Census through which he has lobbied for a number of things, especially homogenisation of the census output areas (because of the relevance of MAUP), and the inclusion of both the income and the religious question.

Michael Bach

Michael has a unique insight to the development, implementation and enforcement of national policy in England. Until April 2005 he was Principal Planner for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) – responsible since 1993 for developing national planning policy for town centres, retail, leisure, economic development and housing.

He developed the Government’s planning policy guidelines for town centres and retail development, PPG6 (1996) and PPS6 (2005), and has been at the leading edge in promoting a change in the culture of planning, moving it towards a genuinely plan-led approach.

Despite having been an advocate of Government policy he has a realistic view of the capacity for change both in planning and in the retail industry, and maintains regular contact with key players in the industry.