Top academic honours for UNIGIS Hungary alumnus

On Nov 30, Peter Gyenizse (UNIGIS Hungary 2004) successfully finished his habilitation process, the highest level of academic qualification in his country. The presentation of his scientific work is titled "An investigation of the physical and social impacts on the urban development of Pécs using GIS".

Pécs, the most populous city of Southern Transdanubia (Southwest-Hungary), is located on the southern foothills and slopes of the Mecsek Mountains and in the bottom of the Pécs Basin. P. Gyenizse's study applies GIS methodology to explore the major physical and social potentials and their influence on the urban environment.

During the last fifteen years almost 200 student have graduated in Geoinformatics from the University of West Hungary. More than 10% of these alumni are holding a PhD degree, which reflects the high quality of this postgraduate course.

The 13th edition of UNIGIS Girona Professional Master in GIS Management starts!

The 13th edition is running and almost 70 new students are part of the worldwide UNIGIS community.

It is a pleasure to have, year after year, this number of registrations wich notes the success of UNIGIS training programs in GIS, adapting to the needs and demands of professional environment.

Another year, UNIGIS Girona will work hard in order to guarantee the success and recognition of UNIGIS training offer.

UNIGIS Girona website

UNIGIS at Intergeo Trade Fair, Cologne

The UNIGIS Salzburg team is advising prospective students in their MSc and professional certificate programs at this year's Intergeo exhibit on Cologne, Germany. Interest in obtaining a widely recognized advanced qualification in Geoinformatics / GIScience continues to draw numerous visitors. At this increasingly international event Asia plays an important role, very much in line with the overall development of the UNIGIS program. Of course, as always, the UNIGIS booth is an important meeting place for the many UNIGIS alumni working at Intergeo or just attending the exhibits.

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.