Abhijeet Chavan

Abhijeet Chavan is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of Planetizen.

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Abhijeet Chavan is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of Planetizen and the executive producer of Planetizen Courses. He was also the chief technology officer of Urban Insight, Inc., the technology consulting firm that operates Planetizen. Abhijeet Chavan has over 20 years of technology consulting experience working with government, higher education, legal services, and non-profit clients. Abhijeet is the founder of OpenAdvocate and the creator of DLAW web platform, WriteClearly plain-language authoring tool and ReadClearly legal web glossaries. Abhijeet was named to the Fastcase 50 list of global legal innovators in 2017.

Abhijeet previously coordinated geographic information (GIS), software development, and data projects for the Imaging Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also served as the information technology coordinator for the East St. Louis Action Research Project, a cross-disciplinary initiative of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with residents and community groups in severely distressed urban areas.Abhijeet received his Master of Architecture (M. Arch) and Master of Landscape Architecture (M.L.A) degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Digital Earth

In his 1992 novel, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash">Snow Crash</a>, writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson">Neal Stephenson</a> imagined the ultimate user interface to access geographic information:<br /> <br /> <blockquote><br /> "There is something new: a globe about the size of grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes... It's a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that the CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns -- all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff." [<a href="http://essw.bren.ucsb.edu/~frew/courses/263/lectures/Future_of_GIS/Snow_Crash.html">More excerpts </a>]</blockquote>