1st Latin American GIS education conference

On September 21st, UNIGIS co-organized the first Latin American Conference on GIS-Education (http://www.sigsa.info/lauc2010/edu.html) in cooperation with ESRI. The conference was hosted by ESRI’s Mexican representative SIGSA (http://www.sigsa.info) and brought together GIS-users, teachers and other faculty from all over Latin America. A curriculum development workshop was held by the director of the UNIGIS program in Latin America, Richard Resl from the University San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Nearly 200 participants discussed common goals and challenges for developing and implementing up-to-date GI curricula that satisfy the specific needs of students and professionals in order to meet the growing demand for high quality GIS-Education in Latin America.

Winners of the UIA Academic Excellence Prize 2010

The UNIGIS International Association (UIA) would like to announce this year’s winners of its worldwide Academic Excellence Prize. The Prize, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, who submits the best MSc thesis (or paper based on their thesis) during the academic year. This year the competition was very tight with six excellent high quality MSc theses and a paper being considered by the UIA Review Board. In the end the panel decided to make three awards.

Eva Willerslev from UNIGIS Manchester has been announced as the winner of the UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize 2010. Her thesis titled “Methods of extracting a coastline from satellite imagery and assessing the accuracy” was considered unanimously by the Review Board as the best thesis this year.

In second place is Pedro Sarmento from UNIGIS Portugal, with a paper “Incorporating reference classification uncertainty into the analysis of land cover accuracy”.

In the third place is Hans-Jörg Stark from UNIGIS Sakzburg, with the thesis "Quality assurance of crowdsourced geocoded address-data within OpenAddresses - Concepts and Implementation".

Congratulations! The Review Board would like to commend these individuals for the high quality of their research.

The competition for the 2011 Prize is now open.

Master Theses Workshop

UNIGIS Salzburg students were attending a September 24/25 workshop presenting and discussing their thesis projects. More than 20 topics ranging across a variety of application domains, from a methodology focus to systems implementation and from business cases to educational perspectives demonstrated the enormous width and depth of GIScience!
The UNIGIS Salzburg team is wishing everybody well with the final stages of their MSc thesis - and congratulates Thomas Purfürst who was first with submitting his work on GNSS signal quality under forest canopy.

UNIGIS Annual Partner Conference

This year, UNIGIS partner universities are convening at ISEGI in Lisbon, Portugal for their annual network coordination conference. Topics like curriculum and learning media development are on the agenda just like joint summer schools, credit transfer and enhancements for the worldwide community of UNIGIS alumni.

With the UNIGIS network approaching its third decade of providing distance learning to GIS/GIScience professionals around the world, its reach now has expanded to all continents and student numbers continue to grow at an impressive pace - testimony to the high quality of education recognized across the GIS industry and all application domains.

UNIGIS chair Prof. Josef Strobl emphasizes: "Our network is now established as THE global virtual university for GIScience, and we are proud of making valuable contributions to the evolving GIS industry and to establishing Spatial Data Infrastructures worldwide!"

UNIGIS Orientation / Promotion workshop in India

“The appreciation and recognition of the UNIGIS network of GIScience education is increasing among students from various disciplines in India“ says Dr. Shahnawaz (Director S&SE Asia, UNIGIS International). This conclusion is based on the educational backgrounds of 26 students and 3 teachers / professionals participating in the UNIGIS orientation workshop organised at the UNIGIS AIILSG study centre, Cochin, Kerala (www.unigis.net/aiilsg_india) on 4th September, 2010. Most of the the participants in this one-day workshop are pursuing postgraduate studies in oceanography, environmental science and geography at various colleges in Kerala.

After open-floor discussions with the participants, Mr. V. Govindankutty (Coordinator, UNIGIS@AIILSG_India) concluded that many students aspire to obtain GI-qualifications but there are hardly any opportunities for quality GIScience education in Kerela. He expressed the urge to organise UNIGIS workshops in various part of Kerala.