Michael P. Peterson is a Professor in the Department of Geography / Geology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (1976), his M.A. from Boston University (1978) and Ph.D. from the State University of New York-Buffalo (1982). He was a Post-Doctoral Assistant at the University of Zürich, Switzerland in 1981-82 and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska - Omaha in 1982 where he has taught courses in world regional geography, cartography, computer mapping, remote sensing and geographic information systems.Dr. Peterson has served as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1985, a Fulbright Fellow at the Free University Berlin, Germany (1990-91), Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa (1995), Visiting Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia (1998), Fulbright Fellow at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria (1999), and visiting Professor at the University of Applied Technology in Munich, Germany in 1999, 2000, 2001, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, in 2004, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris: Tanjung Malim, Malaysia in 2009, Technical University of Vienna, and the Applied University of Karlsruhe in 2011. He served as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand from July-October 2012.He is past-President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) and former editor of Cartographic Perspectives. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Cartographic Perspectives, on the board of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society, and as chair of the Publications Committee of the International Cartographic Association.His publications include: An Evaluation of Unclassed Choropleth Mapping, Evaluating a Map's Image, Mentale Bilder in der Kartographischen Kommunikation (in German), The Mental Image in Cartographic Communication, Interactive Cartographic Animation, Cognitive Issues in Cartographic Visualization, and Active Legends for Interactive Cartographic Animation. Books include Interactive and Animated Cartography, published by Prentice-Hall, Multimedia Cartography published by Springer Verlag, Maps and the Internet, published by Elsevier Press, The Online Method to World Regional Geography published by Kendall-Hunt, the Animated Atlas of Air Traffic, and International Perspectives on Maps and the Internet and Online Maps with APIs and Web Services, both published by Springer Verlag. His "Mapping in the Cloud" textbook was released in 2014.