The UNIGIS@India team led by Dr. Shahnawaz (Director, UNIGIS S/E Asia) played a prominent role in this year’s ‘GeoSmart India‘ conference and exhibition held from 1st to 3rd March, 2016 at the India Expo Centre and Mart, Greater Noida, India. UNIGIS coordinated a full day ‘Youth Forum’ on March 2nd, focussing on geospatial capacity building. More than 50 young students and entrepreneurs, eminent academics, prominent industry leaders and successful professionals joined the forum and shared their rich experiences with geospatial education, research, applications and employment opportunities.
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| (The presenters and the prize winners with UNIGIS Team at Youth Forum) |
UNIGIS has introduced a cash prize since 2015 for the ‘Best Student Paper’ presented in the forum to encourage young students towards geospatial research. The numbers of presented papers in GSI’2016 were quite high and the quality of several papers was equally competitive so the jury decided to share the prize among the 3 top ranked papers. The winners are Mr. S. Abdul Rahaman (Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli, India), Mr. Bibin Wilson (Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, India), Mr. Kyle Younkin (Iowa State University, USA).
Dr. Shahnawaz was also invited as a panelist in the ‘South Asia Geospatial Forum’ which discussed various aspects focussed on ‘Strengthening Regional Geospatial Collaboration through Policies & Data Infrastructure’. Apart from the experts, enterpreneurs and policy makers from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka; the panel discussion involved international collaborators from Europe and USA.