Postgraduate research in GISc, 2007

Towards international graduate student links?

In the first three months of 2007, the Global GISc Academy (together with the Quantitative Methods Research Group of UK’s Royal Geographical Society) ran a series of 30-minute e-seminar presentations from graduate students working towards their PhD’s in a variety of disciplinary frameworks. These presentations have been archived in the table below:

If you look at these presentations, you will see that the quality of the science is in every case very high, but you’ll have to take our word for it that all the talks were extremely competently presented and, despite (or perhaps because of?) the audience being relatively small, the discussions were similarly of high calibre. For most of the students this was the first time they had presented their work to an external audience, which is terrifying enough, but also presenting in ‘e’ added an extra dimension of unfamiliarity. Congratulations to all for handling these challenges. The hope is that using platforms such as that provided by the Marratech™ desk-top conferencing system recently installed on the WUN server as a central facility, these seminars can provide the seed from which sustained, career-long, international contacts can be made.

The Awards

Persuading students to present was assisted by the offer of three ‘carrots’ from WUN in the form of a £250 prize for the best talk, with two £125 prizes for runners up. After some deliberation a group made up of the GGIScA Advisory Panel has decided that the awards should be given as:

First: Phil Platt, University of York.

Only six months into his work, Phil is tackling a difficult problem of spatial prediction in which he uses a series of map ‘layers’ and the evidence of some know locations of tree species to predict where these will be found in unsampled areas. As a bonus, the calibrated model can be sue to predict the impact of changes in external forcing, for example, as provided by climate change on species distributions. Phil wins the first prize by virtue of the quality of the scientific thought that has gone into the analysis, the progress made in such a short period, and his ability to ‘hold’ and navigate his audience through the work.

Runners Up

Dianna Smith, University of Leeds. Dianna gave a very interesting account of her work using microsimulation to analyze the relationship between retail food access in Bradford and diet related illness. The main issue here is scale, especially the need to model at a finer spatial resolution that that for which the available data are aggregated.

Paul Hiemstra, University of Utrecht. Paul showed how spatial interpolation by universal kriging can be made automatic, through a series of devices that enable him to produce a model for the experimental semi-variogram derived from near real time observations of ionizing radiation across the Netherlands. As will be realized, this involve both considerable ingenuity and coding in R.

Congratulations to all three!

Thanks!

Last, and by no means least, thanks are due to Linda See (Geography at Leeds) for putting together such a fascinating programme of talks and to her again, Richard Harris (Bristol), Derek Karssenberg (Utrecht) and Robin Smith (ICOSS, Sheffield) for chairing sessions.

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