About me

I’m a Lecturer in GIScience at the School of Environment, University of Auckland (Māori name: Waipapa Taumata Rau).

I am a quantitative geographer (proud!) with interests in environmental hazards, urban air quality, GIScience, agent-based modelling (ABM) and open source research.

While I mostly teach broader GIScience methods and their applications, which are ‘top-down’ (i.e. get the data, explore the data and find a suitable spatial model), I most enjoy doing research in ABM, where you have to think ‘bottom-up’, e.g. how do you get people to stop at the traffic light and move when they see the green man? It really fascinates my understanding of human cognition. I am not an ML/DL geek or a hardcore compsci dude, but I consider myself a good enough coder to answer my research questions.

I have done research on traffic, exposure to air pollution, crowdsourcing (OpenStreetMap), and even comparing routing engines to determine the similarity of children’s walking behaviour. I have jumped between disciplines, starting in the Department of Geography, then moving to the Earth Sciences, then to Public Health, and here in Auckland I am based in the School of Environment. I also live far from home, in South Korea (GMT + 9), have lived in the UK (GMT + 0), and am now in New Zealand (GMT + 13). Life as an expat is never easy, but I find it a privilege to learn about different lifestyles and environments, and how surprisingly people adapt to them. Yes, I am a fairly young academic who is interested in our world using niche tools.

I also like to chat about very local things (e.g. why on earth does Mt. Wellington have a rugby pitch near its summit?), but not as much about very global things.

Last but not least, my name Hyesop is hard to pronounce. But you can do your best to say H e (just the “H” sound and the “e” as /e/), then “sop”. I keep “JD” as my Starbucks name.