Biography:  Professor Brian George Lees graduated from the University of Sydney with a PhD studying the sediment dynamics of shallow, tidal seas. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Geographic Information Science, is on the editorial boards of GEOINFORMATICA and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Professor Lees is Chairman of the International Geographical Union Commission on Geographical Information Science, and also as a Member of the Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Geography. He has received a number of awards for his work including the Australasian Institute of Spatial Information Science and Technology (AISIST) Prize in recognition of a "substantial contribution to the study of the science of Urban and Regional Information Systems", 1997; the Land Victoria Fellowship, University of Melbourne, 1999 and the Eminent Individual Award; Australasian Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (AURISA) 1999. He was made a Fellow of the Australasian Urban and Regional Information Systems Association in 2003, a Fellow of the Spatial Science Institute in 2005, and a Fellow of the Institute of Australian Geographers in 2009. Professor Lees has been appointed as a Special Invited Professor, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation (ISWC), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yanling, as an Adjunct Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information Systems (LREIS), Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, and as a Member of the Academic Consultative Committee, Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment, Nanjing Normal University, Ministry of Education, China. He is also Deputy Director of the Sino-Australian Joint Research Centre for Coastal Management.

Professor Lees maintains an active research program focused on aspects of Global Change. The first phase was the construction of a database of geomorphic evidence for past climate change across coastal northern Australia. In the second phase he set up a research program to improve the reliability of change detection techniques. This led to work in adapting inductive and data driven modelling techniques to the predictive mapping of land cover and land degradation. He and his students have built up comprehensive GIS databases based on a range of field sites. These have been used to test, and refine the use of inductive learning, and other artificial intelligence techniques such as neural networks and genetic algorithms, for environmental management. They have been very successful. His research activity continues to be the development and application of tools to carry out integrated analysis of global data.