Dear Professor Chien, dear Crison,
Five years have passed since our last exchange, and I have thought of it often. In January 2020 you generously told me that National Taiwan University was ready to process my case, and you invited me to write a research proposal for the Ministry of Science and Technology. Together with Professor JP Chen, Dr. Tu Yi-Ching, Mr. Hsieh Yi-Huan, and later Dr. Hikaru Komatsu, we shaped the first seed of iSEE, Integrated Social, Economic and Environmental Indicators, under the theme Small Islands, Big Opportunities. Then the pandemic intervened, and destiny carried me to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in Beirut.
That seed grew. Over five years I built and coordinated the Geo-Insights Laboratory, a working United Nations platform that now covers all twenty-two Arab states with more than one hundred geospatial data layers and sixteen published geo-stories, organized under seven Policy Lenses and one commitment, Leave No Location Behind. The idea we discussed in 2020 is no longer a proposal. It is a proven, operating system, recognized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. What I could only describe to you then, I can now show you, layer by layer, story by story.
In these five years, our lines of thought have been running in parallel. You have been teaching geography to think in volumes rather than areas, from cloud water governance to the politics of geoengineering in the Anthropocene; over those same years I was building, in practice, a volumetric intelligence system, more than one hundred data layers stacked over one territory. You name your practice the field sciences, rather than model or laboratory sciences; that is precisely the practice I have carried across four continents and three decades, from a portable air sampler in a room, to a bicycle in the streets of a polluted city, to a satellite reading the whole Arab region. And when you write of wind-human resonance, I read it as a fellow cyclist, for the wind has never been a variable to me either, it is a companion. Two careers, two geographies, one way of thinking. We even share a Singapore chapter, you as a visiting research fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, and I at its Energy Studies Institute in 2011.
Now the circle can close. I retire from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia on 3 October 2026, having earlier concluded my career at Statistics Canada, and I am returning home to Canada. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I would like to reignite our dialogue and finally build something constructive and innovative with you. My offer is simple and carries no burden. I can come to National Taiwan University as an Adjunct regardless of any funding. Once there, we can apply for funding together and establish an innovative iSEE Lab. I would prepare several small, focused proposals drawing on my architecture, engineering, urban planning, and Geographic Information Systems background, together with my Artificial Intelligence deep-applied interest, all pointed at one goal, the fusion of data into actionable policy insights, and each one mapped onto a theme you already lead.
Let me also answer, before you ask it, the question every department must ask. Funding is not my risk. Funding is my forte. Four times, in four institutions, on two continents, I have turned an idea into a funded, operating reality. At Public Works and Government Services Canada, in under one year, I secured funding for healthy building technologies through the eWAR (early Warning and Response) system I designed and implemented as a proof of concept, subsequently piloted by both McGill University and Concordia University. At Statistics Canada, I secured over three million dollars to run the largest environmental survey ever conducted on retail gasoline stations in Canada. At the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, I secured the funding to deliver capacity building on the System of Environmental Economic Accounting across island states. And at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, in under one year, I secured full funding for the inception of the Geo-Statistical Laboratory, engaging more than twelve young local professionals to build the first and only full-fledged geospatial laboratory of its kind, known today as Geo-Insights, with more than one hundred data layers and a ready pipeline for user-centric, policy-making integration. So when I say I will arrive as an Adjunct at no cost, understand it as an opening position, not a ceiling. Attracting resources, and building young teams around them, is what I do.
On Artificial Intelligence, a word of humility. Since last year I have been fascinated by it and actively promoting its use in geo-statistical work, and I claim no formal background in it, because the field is new to all of us. What I bring is the judgment of a long practice, the ability to recognize when a model output violates physical or social reality, and the appetite to keep learning.
My calendar for the rest of 2026 is simple. I retire on 3 October. From 5 to 30 October I will be at the World Cycling Centre of the Union Cycliste Internationale in Aigle, Switzerland, training to become a bicycle mechanic, purely as a hobby, because at sixty-three I still ride everywhere and I have never stopped learning with my hands. In November I will be in Portugal at the Web Summit, promoting my startup NexaSEE Technologies. From late November I am fully free. I also deeply enjoy training and mentoring young people, and if you see a fit for me with your students, I am available.
All I ask for is one conversation. It would give me great joy to hear from you again.
Heritage conservation is not a peripheral dimension of the urban research agenda. It is a diagnostic methodology for understanding how cities accumulate value over time — and what is systematically destroyed when urban development proceeds without accounting for that accumulation. Serving as Conservation Officer responsible for the restoration, conservation, preservation and adaptive re-use of twelve United Nations World Heritage Sites and Grounds in the Levant (1993–1997), this work was not antiquarian documentation. It was building pathology diagnosis: the identification of embedded structural vulnerabilities, hygrothermal failures, and material incompatibilities introduced by uninformed renovation interventions into historic fabric. That diagnostic capacity is the direct analogue of the indoor environmental quality measurement methodology — making visible the invisible costs of decisions made without understanding the physics of what they were modifying.
The connection to National Taiwan University is direct. A geography that reads territory in volumes, that practices field sciences, and that asks how cities remember themselves needs exactly this diagnostic capacity for the built past. Heritage quarters are where land-use change is most consequential and least reversible, and the proposal seed pairing heritage quarters with satellite land cover change detection stands on both the ground and the orbit: four years of hands-on conservation practice across twelve United Nations World Heritage Sites in the Levant (1993–1997), joined to the change detection methodology of the Geo-Insights Laboratory. The building pathology training — reading how historic structures respond to environmental stress, understanding material behaviour across centuries, assessing adaptive re-use potential — translates directly into the multi-layer spatial analysis that cultural geography and land governance research need to do convincingly. And four years of negotiating conservation decisions among governmental agencies, religious authorities, municipal governments, and international bodies in politically complex contexts gives me a practical understanding of the institutional and cultural constraints that field research on the built past must navigate.
I am not responding to an advertised post and I am not seeking a permanent appointment. I am proposing to come as an Adjunct regardless of any funding, to apply for funding together once there, and to establish an innovative iSEE Lab — bringing the accumulated tools, datasets, methods, networks, and institutional experience of a two-decade career into the geography where the idea was born. All I ask for is one conversation.