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Dear Undergraduates: Sorry about this delay in getting an important message to you. Something went wrong with my email sent a few days ago. I apologize! I just want to let you know about an exciting opportunity to meet our two Alumni Award recipients that will be visiting us on Thursday (tomorrow)! We will be holding a pizza lunch with Eddie Pickle and Linda Rust in BGB 406 (the seminar room) from 11:30am-1:00pm. Please come by and grab a slice and chat with these two venerable alumni. I have provided bios of both Eddie and Linda below so you can see a little about what they do. One new change for this semester (for those who participated in pizza lunches last year): We need to have a sign-up sheet so that we know there are enough interested people that are happy to attend this meeting so pizza does not go to waste. Both graduates and undergraduates are invited to this event, so don't be shy people. I will put a sign-up sheet on the door to BGB 104 where you can list your name if you are interested in swinging by, even if for a few minutes. PLEASE SIGN-UP IF YOU ARE INTERESTED!!!! If you cannot sign up by mid-morning (say 10 am), but you plan to come by, would you be so kind as to email me ([log in to unmask]) and I will add you to the list? Or just email me now when you get this and I'll add you. Thanks, and let me know if you have any further questions. Ethan Ethan Bottone Ph.D. Student Graduate Teaching Associate Department of Geography University of Tennessee Bios: Distinguished Alumni Early Career Award (<10 years since graduation): Linda Rust (M.S. 2009) Linda's MS project was titled "Geographies of Exclusion: The Challenge of Locating Permanent Supportive Housing for the Chronically Homeless in Knoxville, Tennessee." Linda works as Community Development Administrator in the City of Knoxville. She has maintained regular contact with our department, and presented her research on the homeless in Knoxville in Micheline van Riemsdijk's Cultural Geography course in 2013. She can make a complex issue such as homelessness accessible to our students, and she uses her professional background in the HUD authority to address challenges in providing assistance for the homeless. Distinguished Alumni Lifetime Award (over 25 years since graduation): Eddie Pickle (B.A. 1978) Eddie Pickle pursued an honors major working with Geography faculty that included courses in mathematics, computer science, English, and economics along with geography. He graduated Summa Cum Laude, and was a Torchbearer and a Phi Beta Kappa initiate. He received an NSF fellowship to fund his advanced studies in geography at UCLA (MA 1980). Eddie is currently a Councilor of the American Geographical Society (AGS), has been a senior corporate executive at leading data companies (Claritas and DigitalGlobe) and has founded two geospatial software startups (Ionic Enterprise and Boundless). Eddie started working on a Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA, but left in 1981 to begin a career in the nascent field of commercial demography and applying technology to geographic problems. He became a demographic statistician and site location analyst for CACI in Los Angeles and an expert in the emerging fields of geodemographics and market segmentation. In 1987, Eddie was recruited by Claritas to help improve the PRIZM system that formed the basis for information contained in the non-fiction best seller The Clustering of America by Michael J. Weiss (Harpercollins 1988). He rose to become President of the Claritas Financial Services Group. In the late 1990s, Eddie and a former Claritas president formed IXI (now part of Equifax) to build even more sophisticated market segmentation systems. In 2002, Eddie, along with the current President of the AGS Christopher Tucker, founded Ionic Enterprises, a company that brought Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) software into wide market use. The company grew into a multi-million dollar software enterprise and was purchased by Hexagon in 2007. In 2009, Eddie was recruited by the Open Planning Project, a New York-based nonprofit working for better transportation alternatives. Eddie developed a profit arm of the company called Open Geo and produced the leading geospatial open source software (Geo Server). In 2013, Open Geo was reincorporated as Boundless Spatial, Inc. In 2014, Eddie stepped down as CEO of Boundless Spatial, Inc. and, in 2015, joined Radiant Blue, a leading developer of technology to the US Intelligence community. Eddie developed and deployed a cloud-based open source geotechnology application (GEOINT Service) that was subsequently acquired by Digital Globe. Today Eddie is using his combined geographic data and software expertise to help Digital Globe tackle the challenges of managing and operating massive imagery and vector data storage in the cloud to solve a multitude of human and physical geography problems. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- To review the archives of CLUBGGY or Join/Leave the list go to: http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/clubggy.html