UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize – 2009 Awards announced

Christof Amelunxen from UNIGIS Salzburg has been announced as the winner of the worldwide UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize 2009.  His thesis titled ”An Approach to Geocoding based on Volunteered Spatial Data” not only led to an award with distinction of his MSc in GIScience by the University of Salzburg, but recently was voted by the International Review Board as the best (English language) UNIGIS thesis this year. 

Pedro Pinto from UNIGIS Portugal finished a very close second in a highly competitive finish. He submitted a paper "Urban growth on coastal erosion vulnerable stretches" published in Journal of Coastal Research, Vol. 2, Special Issue 56, pp. 1567-1571.

Both winners will be invited to present their work in July 2010 at the Geoinformatics Forum Salzburg (www.gi-forum.org) where they will be publicly recognized for their outstanding academic achievement.

Congratulations!

Annual Meeting - Girona, Spain

The Spanish/Catalan UNIGIS site in Girona again hosted the annual UNIGIS worldwide network meeting on Nov 13/14, 2009. Representatives from 11 university partner sites were discussing eLearning didactics, curriculum development and new learning materials as well as innovative approaches to acquiring new GIS qualifications.
Integration among UNIGIS partner institutions is making substantial progress due to the shared access to learning resources, credit recognition and joint events like summer schools and workshops.
Links with the GIS industry are continuously enhanced through cooperation with software companies, publishers and consulting companies, assuring that UNIGIS curricula, accompanying software and application case studies remain on top of recent developments.
Congratulations to Gemma Boix and her team at the University of Girona for managing a very successful meeting.

Two new UNIGIS study centres in India

UNIGIS India (www.unigis.net/India) has launched programmes at 2 new study centres in India. The new centres have been established at Panjab University, Chandigarh (www.unigis.net/PU_Chandigarh) and the All India Institute for Local Self Government (www.unigis.net/AIILSG_India). The introductory-cum-orientation workshops were held in Chandigarh from 4th to 6th September and in Cochin from 11th to 13th September.

Prof. Josef Strobl (UNIGIS International and Director of the Centre for Geoinformatics - Z_GIS, University of Salzburg , Austria) emphasised that UNIGIS has the vision of ’Educating GIS Professionals Worldwide’ and Z_GIS (http://www.zgis.at/) is supporting this mission by establishing UNIGIS programmes with partner institutions around the world as joint study programmes with the University of Salzburg (http://www.uni-salzburg.at/)

Dr Shahnawaz (UNIGIS Director for South & Southeast Asia) stated that the addition of 2 new centres made India the only country hosting 4 UNIGIS study centres. In 2004, India became the first UNIGIS site within Asia and a 2nd study centre was established in 2006. The previous centres are located at Goa University, Goa (www.unigis.net/Goa) and GIS Institute, Noida-Delhi (www.unigis.net/Noida).

Out of 4 study centres in India, 2 offer UNIGIS MSc and UNIGIS professional diploma programmes via Online Distance Education and 2 focus on the UNIGIS professional diploma delivered through eLearning as tutored full time courses. Distance education serves the career advancement needs of in-service GI-professionals and full time residential courses provide opportunites to young students aspiring to enter the fast growing GI-Job market.

UIA Academic Excellence Prize – Award Ceremony

Andre Coleman (UNIGIS – Free University of Amsterdam), the winner of the Academic Excellence Prize 2008 presented his high quality MSc thesis at the GI_Forum 2009 in Salzburg. His dissertation entitled: “An Adaptive Landscape Classification Procedure Using Geoinformatics and Artificial Neural Networks” was considered unanimously by the Review Board as the best thesis this year. For more details see the press coverage of the GI_Forum / AGIT conference.

After the speech he was publicly awarded with a great cup by Josef Strobl in recognition of his work and the academic achievement. Congratulations!

The competition for the 2009 Prize is open. All UNIGIS partner universities worldwide are encouraged to take part in the competition

Geospatial Education Forum at Map Asia 2009

As a ’Knowledge partner’ in Map Asia 2009 (18-20 August, 2009) UNIGIS is coordinating an education forum on the theme ’From Spatial Thinking to GI Competence’ on Aug 19 in Singapore. This forum has been planned with the mandate to bring together educators and professionals on one platform to share their experience and expertise. UNIGIS programme information materials will be disseminated from a shared booth with GIS Development.