UIA Academic Excellence Prize – Award Ceremony

Two of the UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize 2010 winners - Eva Willersley (UNIGIS Manchester) and Hans-Jörg Stark (UNIGIS Salzburg) presented their top quality MSc theses at the GI_Forum 2011 in Salzburg.

The thesis from Eva Willersley titled “Methods of extracting a coastline from satellite imagery and assessing the accuracy” was considered as the best UNIGIS thesis in 2010. Hans-Jörg Stark presented another winning thesis titled "Quality assurance of crowdsourced geocoded address-data within OpenAddresses - Concepts and Implementation".

After presentation at the GI_Forum they were publicly awarded with the trophy by UNIGIS International chair Josef Strobl in recognition of their work and the academic achievement. Congratulations!

The competition for the 2011 Prize is currently open. All UNIGIS partner universities worldwide are encouraged to take part in the competition.

UNIGIS at AGIT and GI_Forum

Traditionally, the annual GI_Forum and AGIT Symposia at the University of Salzburg from July 4-8 are highlights for the UNIGIS community: more than 100 students and alumni will not only actively participate in conference events, but will meet with fellow students and the UNIGIS team face-to-face as a welcome break from telecommunication-heavy distance learning.

Some UNIGIS graduates will be recognized for their achievements, e.g. the winners of the UNIGIS International Association top Masters theses have the chance to present their work immediately following Ian Dowman's keynote on Thursday morning.

The Z_GIS - UNIGIS booth in the exhibit area again will serve as the meeting point for UNIGIS students, graduates and faculty throughout the conference. This location is the best point for information and consulting for prospective future students in the MSc and professional certificate programmes: AGIT / GI_Forum mark the opening of the registration period for the next UNIGIS courses starting in October 2011 (UNIGIS professional) and January 2012 (UNIGIS MSc)!

Gudrun Wallentin leading Salzburg UNIGIS MSc

Gudrun Wallentin has been promoted to director of studies, UNIGIS MSc at the University of Salzburg from July 1, 2011. Gudrun is joining the UNIGIS Salzburg team from the Institute of GIScience, Austrian Academy of Sciences and will be coordinating this highly regarded distance learning Masters programs (in English and German language) in Geographic Information Systems and Science!

She has a degree in ecology from the University of Innsbruck, several years of experience in managing a regional nature / conservation park in the Tyrolean Alps, subsequently received an MSc in GIS from the University of Edinburgh and her PhD for the thesis 'Individual Based Models in Ecology', exploring and applying spatiotemporal concepts in regionalized climate change analysis.

Dr Wallentin will not only provide leadership and direction to the continuous development of UNIGIS curricula, learning media and online pedagogy, but also will offer supervision and consulting to current and prospective UNIGIS students, and will contribute her experience and knowledge in GIScience to the development of future generations of GIS experts!

Welcome, Gudrun - we're glad to have you on board!!

UNIGIS at Geoinformatik 2011

For the third time UNIGIS presents its distance-learning programs at the 'Geoinformatik', a symposium on GIS with a small trade fair, hosted by the University of Münster (Germany) this year. The UNIGIS-booth serves as meeting point for UNIGIS-Alumni, active participants and interested (future) students. As a novelty we share our booth with the research studio iSPACE in order to emphasize the strong integration of UNIGIS in a vital network of research and industrial application.
For those who haven’t made it to Münster the next opportunity to get in touch with UNIGIS lies straight ahead: visit us at GI-Forum and AGIT, July 5-8 in Salzburg.

UNIGIS Academic Excellence Prize 2011

The UNIGIS International Association is pleased to announce the next 'UNIGIS International Academic Excellence Prize' competition. The Academic Excellence Prize, launched by UIA in 2007/08, is awarded on an annual basis to a student, from one of the UNIGIS Centers Worldwide, who produces the most outstanding MSc Dissertation/Thesis or paper during the academic year.

All UNIGIS centers are encouraged to take part in the competition. Centres are reminded that they can only enter two students in any one year.

The criteria used to evaluate the theses include: technical quality, quality of literature review, relevance, presentation and originality. The standard of the work submitted last year was very high and UIA expect the same high standards this time.

The competition for the 2011 Prize is now open. Candidates must submit their MSc thesis or their paper to the graduating UIA partner institution no later than August 31.