Blogs

UNIGIS Krakow student receives UIA thesis award at GI_Forum

The UNIGIS International Association (UIA) awarded this year’s Academic Excellence Prize for the best Master Thesis to Agnieszka Wypych, UNIGIS Krakow. Ms Wypych received the award from UIA president Prof. J. Strobl at the GI_Forum conference in Salzburg, where she presented her research to an international audience. To introduce her talk, Agnieszka Wypych reflected on UNIGIS as a life-long learning opportunity. With UNIGIS she aimed at getting GIS-educated to complement her primary domain of meteorology. She demonstrated that she succeeded in reaching this aim at a remarkably high level. Congratulation Agnieszka for the well-deserved award!

Academic Graduation, UNIGIS MSc Salzburg

In the run-up to this year’s AGIT and GI-Forum, a group of UNIGIS students of the UNIGIS MSc 2010 group took advantage of the special opportunity to receive their degree awards at this summer term’s official academic graduation ceremony at the University of Salzburg. Rector Heinrich Schmidinger personally handed over the certificates of graduation to the students who participated in the ceremony. Congratulations on behalf of the entire UNIGIS team Salzburg!

Sven Tschirner to receive UNIGIS Master Thesis Award 2013

Sven Tschirner is awarded this year’s UNIGIS Master Thesis Award. In his master thesis he presents an approach for designing and executing distributed queries against INSPIRE data by means of the Semantic Web. Learn more about this exciting research at our UNIGIS Alumni Website. Congratulations to Sven from the whole UNIGIS team. We are looking forward to welcoming him in Salzburg at next year’s AGIT edition.

Registrations for UNIGIS Central Asia opened …

Applications are now accepted for the fall 2013 intake at the UNIGIS Central Asia study centre – see http://acagisc.blogspot.com/2013/06/unigis-distance-learning-msc.html!

UNIGIS meets Turkish Geographers!

UNIGIS was invited to contribute to the First Annual Meeting of the Turkish Association of Geographers held at Fatih University, Büyükçekmece, Istanbul from 19th to 22nd June, 2013. The event was organised in the form of a scientific conference which brought together more than 350 participants, primarily from Turkey and some from other countries, to benefit from about 185 presentations delivered in 51 sessions. Dr. Shahnawaz (Director UNIGIS S/E Asia) represented the UNIGIS network at the conference and gave a presentation entitled ‘UNIGIS Online Distance Education Towards International GIScience Qualifications’. A vibrant discussion followed the presentation, clarifying questions and demand for further information …

Successfully started: UNIGIS Professional May 2013

Fourteen highly motivated UNIGIS professional students have recently met in Salzburg for their introductory workshop. Yes, of course, all the organizational issues were discussed, core modules as well as optional modules presented and several tipps for software handling communicated. BUT, actually the most important agenda items were the coffee breaks and the dinner. Why? Simply because getting to know each other is critical for every day communication during the whole UNIGIS study. We see an efficient communication as the key for successful study results and moreover, communicating about UNIGIS helps to keep the motivation high. Motivation is needed for what …

UNIGIS@Kathmandu visits ICIMOD!

The students of UNIGIS@Kathmandu, lead by the UNIGIS programme coordinator Prof. Krishna Poudel, visited the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) for a professional workshop on 23rd June, 2013. The workshop was conducted by the experts from MENRIS division  headed by Mr. Basanta Shrestha. The members of MENRIS team gave interactive presentations on Land Cover Classification & Change Analysis, Remote Sensing for REDD: MRV, Automated Forest Fire Alert System, Web-visualization tools as well as introduced the Mountain GeoPortal developed by them. During a vibrant discussion session, the UNIGIS students raised questions about the contributions of MENRIS in using GIS & RS and promoting its applications for …

GIS by women: UNIGIS Day Switzerland

This year’s UNIGIS Switzerland Day at the ‘University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil’ (HSR) viewed GISc from a gender perspective. Exclusively female speakers gave an impressive overview on the firm establishment of GIS in public authorities, consultancies, research and education. Apart from innovative applications, many presentations focused on the current challenge of crafting spatial data infrastructures for the management and the public provision of spatial data. As a highlight of the event, Timo Reissner received his Diploma for successful completion of  his UNIGIS MSc study, with a Master Thesis on a fragmentation analysis in the Swiss Kanton Aargau (Foto: Gudrun Wallentin …

UNIGIS at Geospatial World Forum, Rotterdam

UNIGIS International again was invited to this high-profile annual industry flagship event – GWF’13, representing the worldwide scope of geospatial distance education in an exhibit booth. Frequented by alumni from across the globe, current students and interested leaders from the GIS community, the UNIGIS booth coordinated by Dr. Shahnawaz with strong support from UNIGIS Amsterdam turned out to be a popular meeting place. Among the visitors was a delegation from the South Ural State University in Chelyabinsk, led by Rector Alexander Shestakov with his colleagues from the Research Educational Center ‘GeoInformation Systems’. During the exhibit days, most interest in UNIGIS …

Ten Things You Need to Know about UNIGIS

Directions Magazine is offering several special articles in its current ‘education week’ making for excellent reading. Starting from a podcast discussing recent news and announcements and exploring trends in the geospatial education domain, enquiries about UNIGIS led to a well received brief article about the “Ten Things You Need to Know about UNIGIS”. This in turn leads to interesting discussion of what’s unique about UNIGIS, how and why distance learning for in-service professional development evolves compared to more traditional learning pathways, and how lifelong learning cycles might or might not accelerate in the future … talk about this with your peers!