Hello and welcome to my new blog. I’ve been blogging for a few years in several places but I felt the time had to come to consolidate all the blogs to one location and give me a single place to share some of my views, some of my research and most importantly, hopefully, teach you something new. So before I start blogging I thought I’d tell you a bit about myself.

I’m Steve and currently work as a Researcher at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL (University College London). I originally come from just outside Glasgow, Scotland but have taken the long trip south for tropical climates and ended up living in London. My current research focuses on distributed high performance computing and analysing large datasets in real-time (while mapping the results!). In my spare time you can find me walking long distances, climbing mountains, composing music or playing the piano or trumpet.

In recent years I have specialised on building mobile applications (mainly iOS) and systems that open up the world of data visualisation, mining and analysis to the masses. I can sometimes be found on StackOverflow answering questions about Google Maps API and the iOS SDK, and answering MacOS problems. In addition to this I give lectures and workshops to academics and industry partners on using Google Docs and Fusion Tables to create compelling visualisations to showcase on Google Maps and Google Earth.

I’ve won various awards over the years for my development efforts and my projects have featured all over the web, printed media and on TV. I’ll document these on my about page in the coming weeks. My most recent recognition the past few months is being made a Google Developer Expert for Maps. I’ll be using this blog to share some of my experiences from being a GDE and share with you some tutorials helping you get the most out of your mapping projects. So sit back, enjoy the posts and don’t forget to get in touch with your comments either via Twitter or Google Plus.