Winners of the UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize

The UNIGIS International Association (UIA) is honoured to announce the winners of its 2014 Academic Excellence Prize:

This award, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, nominated by their UNIGIS sites for submitting the best MSc thesis (or paper) during the academic year. This year the competition was very tight with nine excellent high quality MSc theses being considered by the review panel. In the end the panel decided to make four awards.

The winner of the Academic Excellence Prize for 2014 was Heidi El Hosaini (UNIGIS UK), the first runner up was Trang Minh VoPham (USC) and in joint third place were Cátia Sofia Alves Gouveia (UNIGIS Portugal) and Stefan Mayer (UNIGIS Salzburg). The Review Panel would like to commend and congratulate these individuals and the other candidates for the high quality of work.

Winning thesis topics:

• Heidi El Hosaini (UNIGIS UK) "Locating and positioning solar panels in a 3D city model – a case study of Newcastle".
• Trang Minh VoPham (UNIGIS USC) "Integrating Landsat and California Pesticide Exposure estimation at aggregated analysis scales: accuracy assessment of rurality".
• Cátia Sofia Alves Gouveia (UNIGIS Portugal) "Predicting the impacts of climate change on the distribution and conservation of endemic forest land snails of Madeira Island".
• Stefan Mayer (UNIGIS Salzburg): "An approach to model the thermal demand of buildings. A case study using two districts of Graz".

Start learning the language of space!

No matter if you develop agrarian insurance products, maintain facility networks, provide data for community planning or do research on golden eagles: space matters.

The real world doesn’t happen on a needles tip. It requires physical space. Space not as a kind of arbitrary shoebox, it is the spatial configuration of things that often plays the key role: Real world processes require a certain form of coincidence, adjacency, nearness, connectedness or other form of spatial relationship between their elements to work out fine or happen at all.  Maps can help to understand those processes in their spatial and chronological dimension, computers can be used to model and simulate them in a digital sandbox, representing the real world.

However, before we can do so and use the respective results to make better decisions, we need to learn.  Not just about GI-software and data but also about the language of space. A group of 15 future GI-professionals will extensively do so within a year from now and already made a start at their introductory workshop in Salzburg. The first geospatial insights came cloud-based and shed a light on the spatial properties of the group itself. Who might be easy to reach partners to establish a local learning group? Is it possible to define my spatial neighbors and if yes, who are they? Also the question of centrality was discussed. However, centrality within a student group doing distance learning is probably better expressed in non-spatial terms: Sometimes communication matters as well.

Upcoming u_Lecture Webinars

UNIGIS u_Lecture webinars are presented by invited speakers from academia, the GI industry, public administration, NGOs and other actors in the field of Geoinformatics and GIScience. Although this online lecture series is primarily designed for UNIGIS alumni and active UNIGIS students, participation is free for everybody.

u_Lectures autumn/winter:

• 21 October 2014:
  Ed Parsons, Google
  Google Maps: Reinventing Cartography

• 25 November 2014:
  Darren Ruddell, University of Southern California
  Geospatial Technologies and Urban Resilience: Building a Better World
• 16 December 2014:
  Muki Haklay, University College London
  What geographic information science got to do with citizen science?
• 27 January 2015 (double feature, MSc work):
  Heidi El-Hosaini, MSc student @ UNIGIS UK*
  Locating and positioning solar panels in a 3D city model - a case study of Newcastle, UK
  Emma Lewinson, MSc student @ UNIGIS UK*
  Analysing British wildlife distributions using a mobile GIS app for data capture
  
  *Both students will present an overview of their recent MSc research work at UNIGIS UK.

We cordially invite you to make use of this professional and academic ‚updating‘ opportunity.

Success story of UNIGIS Hungary continued ...

On September 20th, this year's group of 12 new UNIGIS candidates met for the first time under the new umbrella of Óbuda University. The Institute of Geoinformatics at the Alba Regia Technical Faculty in Székesfehérvár welcomed a highly motivated and ambitious class composed of surveyors, agricultural and forest engineers, geographers and other disciplines.

With this 19th intake UNIGIS Hungary continues to offer advanced education within the UNIGIS International framework, leading students to a formal qualification with a postgraduate certificate and options to obtain international MSc degrees.