Old Thesis: 1995-1996

Here's an abstract from a talk I gave about my second thesis idea:

A Computational Model for Geographic Information Systems
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Geographic Information Systems are an increasingly pervasive
technology in industry and academia.  The ability to relate objects by
spatial, graph, and alpha-numeric attributes makes GIS a powerful
analytical and decision making tool.  Most of the early work in GIS
had been done by commercial interests such as IBM, DEC, ESRI,
Intergraph, and MapInfo.  However, the academic community has recently
"rediscovered" GIS as an exciting research area.  Most of the
excitement lies in the fact that GIS integrates so many different
disciplines: Algorithms, Geometry, Databases, Image Processing, and
Operating Systems to name a few.  This cross pollination of
disciplines is leading to many new discoveries in Computer Science.
This talk presents an introduction to Geographic Information Systems
and derives a computational model more suited to the kinds of I/O
bound problems encountered in a typical GIS.

Here's some preliminary writing towards a thesis proposal .