Yvan Bédard
Director, Geomatics

Yvan Bédard has been a professor of GIS and spatial databases at Laval University's Department of Geomatic Sciences since completing his Ph.D. in 1986. He has an engineering background with 19 years' experience in GIS, databases, and computer sciences, as well as 4 years' experience with warehousing, spatial OLAP, and Web mapping. He became director of the department's GIS Laboratory in 1987 and is an active member of the Center for Research in Geomatics, where he acted as founding director from 1989 to 1995 ($2 million annual budget, 100 members). He also has a strong background in both fundamental and applied research, and is involved in government and private sector projects both in Canada and abroad.

Dr. Bédard has a multi-million dollar competitive grant and contract record, including projects for major organizations such as Geomatics Canada, National Defence, the Canadian Space Agency, Health Canada, B.C. Environment Lands & Parks, the Quebec Department of Natural Resources, the Quebec Department of Transportation, the Quebec Department of the Environment, SNC-Lavalin, Geomat International, Intergraph, Intélec, the Quebec City Public Health Center (CHUQ-CHUL), the European Union, the World Bank, etc. His experience encompasses a number of fields (forestry, transportation, land registers, the environment, agriculture, geology, tax mapping, utilities, digital libraries and geodata infrastructures, and public health) as well as major commercial GISs (Intergraph, ESRI, MapInfo, Pamap), DBMSs (Oracle, Informix, Access), CASEs (Oracle tools, ObjectMaker, Visio, Perceptory), OLAPs (Powerplay), and Web mapping technologies (Geomedia WebMap, MapGuide, AVS).

Partnerships over the years with government and industry have led Dr. Bédard to participate in the design of commercial products, and provide expert advice for needs analyses, feasibility studies, strategic planning exercises, and project evaluations for, among others, the Auditor General of Quebec, Geomatics Canada, the World Bank, the Quebec Land Registry Service, the City of Cordoba in Argentina, CDG, Innovatec Québec, and various banks and private companies. He also served as the first Scientific Director (and co-founder) of the Quebec Center for the Development of Geomatics-a joint industry-government-university organization. He has published 150 papers and book chapters and made some 150 presentations worldwide, many for nonspecialists. He is also a member of several national and international associations and has given continuing education courses to nearly 1,000 professionals in Canada and Europe. Dr. Bédard is currently the scientific leader and co-leader respectively of two major Web-centric GIS/geospatial data warehousing/OLP projects with the Canadian GEOIDE Network of Centers of Excellence in Geomatics, one in fundamental research and the other in public health. His main research interest is improving the efficiency of analytical and design methods for developing geospatial data warehouses and spatial OLAP databases in the context of Web-centric geographic knowledge discovery.
 
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