Todd Huffman Joins as an AGS Fellow

The American Geographical Society (AGS) is pleased to announce our newest Fellow, Todd Huffman. Mr. Huffman is co-founder and CEO of 3Scan, a director of IST Research, and a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, all organizations involved in the collection, organization, and understanding of spatial data in different domains. 3Scan is a computational pathology company building next-generation robotic microscopes for imaging and analyzing 3D spatial relationships in disease. IST Research solves information architecture challenges faced by those working in harsh conditions, such as post-crisis, and post-conflict reconstruction. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) applies the principles of open source and open data sharing to humanitarian response and economic development.

Mr. Huffman is not a geographer, but he is a mapper.  He is educated in neuroscience, bioinformatics, and business, and has applied these talents to how we measure, see, and understand problems spanning nine orders of magnitude: from microns to kilometers. Despite dramatic differences in scale and domain, Mr. Huffman recognizes the importance of observing common principles in the transducing the world into data to support informatics-driven decisions. Mr. Huffman’s work has increased the resolution and scope of available data by redesigning collection workflows to change the economics of collection. Fostering communities is also a passion, and his projects frequently contribute to open-source software and open data sharing.

“Geography has always been an inspiration, and I’m frequently spreading Tobler's first law of geography to biologists: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. Distance-based relationships transcend traditional scales, and I look forward to helping bring the principles AGS supports to new domains.” says Mr. Huffman.

Mr. Huffman’s work at 3Scan involves redesigning microscopes and the workflows associated with them, many of which were designed hundreds of years ago for human hands, eyes, and minds, for robotics sensors and computational analysis. The company’s flagship automated microscope, the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope, uses a novel diamond blade illuminator, robotics, and line-scan cameras to image and analyze microscopic structures hundreds of times faster than humans can. 3Scan is used by pharmaceutical companies to improve the pipelines for developing treatment for diseases with complex spatial components, such as solid tumors in cancer.

On the way to founding 3Scan, Mr. Huffman’s passion for mapping led him to Afghanistan, first working as a volunteer with Dr. Dave Warner and Dr. Lin Wells supporting medical and infrastructure development in 2008. He educated Afghans on using geospatial tools, and helped create the OpenStreetMap contributor community responsible for successfully renegotiating the entire country’s road data into an OSM compatible license. Along the same lines, in 2010, he deployed with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to Haiti to help train Haitians on damage assessment after the earthquake. He has supported OSM projects around the world.

While in Afghanistan Mr. Huffman joined the DARPA Forward Cell, led by Ryan Paterson, constructing a set of techniques for collecting and interpreting crowd-sourced data. For this work, his team was awarded a Department of Defense Joint Meritorious Unit Award. Mr. Paterson and Mr. Huffman have continued to work together at IST Research, where Mr Huffman is on the Board of Directors and is actively involved in projects such as the PULSE Platform. IST uses telecommunications technology to rapidly design and implement two-way communication systems in remote areas to help assess, plan, and coordinate interventions to solve rapidly evolving problems. The technology has been used around the world in areas such as Afghanistan, Liberia, Zambia, and more.

If you are interested in becoming an AGS Fellow, click HERE.