Monday, October 21, 2019

Erasmus+ CBHE: Successful DSinGIS project meeting

In the framework of the DSinGIS project, which aims to support Uzbekistan in sustainable development by geoinformation sciences (GISc), the 2nd review meeting took place in Tashkent in mid of October. This meeting was organized by the Uzbek partners at Tashkent Institute of Architecture and Civil Engineering (TIAC) .
As one of the objectives of this project is to enhance the scientific level of academic and research staff at UZ partner universities, the project meeting started with a full-day training workshop on “Research methodologies and scientific writing”. Highly engaged and motivated researchers from different partner universities in Uzbekistan participated in this training and gained a lot of new insights how to improve their writing techniques and which possibilities they can use for publishing their scientific results in various open access journals.
Inspired by this workshop, Ilhom Abdurahmanov, one of the project coordinators, organized an additional presentation about “Research methodologies and scientific writing” which was held by Erika Blaschke, one of the representatives of PLUS, at Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers (TIIAME). More than 30 participants, consisting of faculty members, as well as of senior scientists and young researchers, followed this presentation, which ended up in a lively discussion on different aspects on scientific publishing and scientific collaboration possibilities cross-boarders.

Z_GIS contact: Sabine Hennig

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

International Real-Scenario Assessment of the HUMAN+ Demonstrator

Real-world Exercise with International Humanitarian Experts to Evaluate the HUMAN+ Project Developments

The HUMAN+ project team gathered at the THW training center in Neuhausen, Germany for an in-depth project demonstration and hands-on sessions with experts in the field of disaster management, representing different institutions like the Red Cross, THW, Johanniter, and the police. The HUMAN+ demonstrator supports the detection and management of refugee movements in order to coordinate humanitarian aid. The demonstrator includes various innovative geospatial layers that visualise refugee-related activities at different administrative levels. Half of the layers are based on social media data such as a hotspot layer that shows geospatial clusters of refugee-related activities, or the origin/destination layers that quantify how many people are leaving a region and where they are heading to.

During the demonstration, the experts worked on real international and national scenarios and assessed the situations based on the geospatial layers provided by the demonstrator. Following a critical discussion the experts highly acknowledged the current state of the demonstrator but provided valuable domain-specific feedback to tailor the demonstrator to the needs for effective disaster management. This input was directly used in the follow-up discussion of the technical development partners, during which the future implementation steps were agreed upon.

The final project results will be available around mid 2020. More information can be found at https://giscience.zgis.at/human

HUMAN+ is funded by the Austrian security research programme KIRAS of the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit), and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).



Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Netzwerk Itzling visit in the iDEAS:lab

Members of the Netzwerk Itzling, a representative interest group for the residents and different actors in the district, visited the iDEAS:lab for an exchange of thoughts and ideas. Visitors got an impression about media technology, methodology and different applications referring Geoinformatics. Technologies like GPS, Virtual Reality, Object Based Image Analysis and several Digital-Earth- Applications required the attention of the visitors.  

The overall aim is to establish a consistent exchange between scienctists from different faculties like the Center for Human- Computer Interaction, the faculty of chemistry and physics as well as the ideas:lab which belongs to the interfaculty department of Geoinformatics. Furthermore citizens and business representatives should have the possibility to get an impression about the different research areas which are located in the Science City Itzling.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

ASEA Uninet Workshop in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam!

The Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS implemented a week-long Interdisciplinary Faculty Development Workshop on 'Integrated Spatial Management with GIScience' at University of Transport and Communications, Ho Chi Minh City campus (UTC-HCMC), Vietnam. The workshop was organised jointly by Z_GIS and UTC-HCMC from 23rd to 27th September, 2019 and it was co-funded by ASEA Uninet Austria.

Prof. Josef Strobl (Head of Z_GIS) had been guiding the design and implementation of various types of activities for enhancing geospatial capabilities at the cooperating Universities in Southeast Asia (i.e. Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) over the last one and half decades. This was the 15th GIScience capacity building workshop Z_GIS has conducted in the region and altogether trained about 500 university level young teachers and students.

Dr. Tran Xuan Hoa, Deputy Head of Science, Technology and International Cooperation Department, UTC-HCMC chaired the inaugural session of this workshop. The session opened with a welcome address delivered by Dr. Le Van Phuc, Vice Dean of Faculty of Civil Engineering and it was followed by introduction of the workshop and the the participants.

Dr. Shahnawaz from Z_GIS taught the concepts of GIScience and spatial analyses to the participants as well as trained them in generating and processing a range of data sets required for integrated spatial management using ArcGIS Pro software. Having background in civil engineering, 16 young teachers and students participated in the workshop and worked on group projects focusing on applications of GIScience in Building Information Management, Highway & Long Bridge Construction as well as their monitoring and Management during floods.

(participants displaying workshop completion certificates)

Prof. Dr. Nguyan Van Hung, Vice Rector (UTC-HCMC), congratulated the participants for having benefitted from this pioneering GIScience workshop in the campus. He also conveyed his gratitude to Z_GIS as well as to ASEA Uninet and extended invitation to Z_GIS faculty for strengthening and expanding institutional collaboration for longterm mutual benefits.