Are you a GIS specialist? Are you interested in GIS? Want to learn more about developing a career in GIS?
Join UNIGIS UK for an afternoon of activities to celebrate 25 years of online and distance learning in Geographical Information Systems. The occasion will include:
For anyone planning on going to the GeoBusiness 2016 Conference and Exhibition, please pop by the UNIGIS stand (A7) in the exhibition hall for a chat. Richard Armitage and Graham Smith will be looking after the UNIGIS UK stand throughout.
The exhibition and workshops are free to attend at GeoBusiness 2016 - you can register online or turn up on the day. If you want to attend the conference as a delegate then please remember your student cards as this will entitle you to discount. Check out the website for further details:
The latest edition of GeoConnexions UK is now available online and contains articles by some of the UNIGIS teaching team - please follow the links below to read the short articles.
Along with the 25 years of UNIGIS celebrations taking place this year, the University of Salford is also celebrating 50 years of Geography at Salford. Geography has been taught at Degree level at the University of Salford continuously since 1965. Ten Bachelor Degrees and four Masters Degree programmes have been taught during this 50 year period, with UNIGIS starting up in 1990. Geography was originally based in the Liberal Studies Department of the Royal College of Advanced Technology and contributed to a Joint Honours Degree in Social Studies.
Many congratulations to Dr James Cheng who has been awarded a visiting professorship of GIS and Human Geography at the key lab for environmental monitoring and resource utilization, under the Ministry of Education of China (located at Guangxi Normal College) by the Guangxi Provincial Bureau of Education. This will support his study on urbanization in China particularly the deprived regions including Guangxi province.
The British Academy’s Research Awards Committee have awarded Dr Cheng a small research grant for a project entitled ‘Inequities in the perceived environmental health risks and interventions in a fast developing country’. The project is led by Dr Cheng through collaboration with Prof Qiyan Wu at Nanjing Normal University, China.
A recent survey of local authority members of the Public Sector Mapping Agreement highlights considerable efforts to implement Open Source solutions. Over half of the local authorities that completed the survey use Open Source GIS software, citing economic reasons as a key motivation, and reported a variety of benefits and challenges. There is a high level of interest in Open Source technology by those who have not yet used the software.
Professor Mark Danson from the School of Environment & Life Sciences has won support from the Royal Society to lead a Theo Murphy International Scientific Meeting to be held at The Society’s Chicheley Hall in February 2017. The meeting will bring together a star line-up of researchers from around the world to discuss “The terrestrial laser scanning revolution in forest ecology”.
Standard registration is now open for the 2016 ESRI User Conference in San Diego June 27 – July 1. The conference expects around 16,000 GIS users, managers and developers and boasts 300 moderated sessions, 450 hours of technical training, 300 software vendors and inspirational keynotes. In addition you can benefit from one-on-one sessions with Esri technical and professional support staff. To register and find out more visit http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/.
Along with the 25 years of UNIGIS celebrations taking place this year, the University of Salford is also celebrating 50 years of Geography at Salford. Geography has been taught at Degree level at the University of Salford continuously since 1965. Ten Bachelor Degrees and four Masters Degree programmes have been taught during this 50 year period, with UNIGIS starting up in 1990. Geography was originally based in the Liberal Studies Department of the Royal College of Advanced Technology and contributed to a Joint Honours Degree in Social Studies.
You are invited to attend GeoDATA 2015, a FREE* series of educational, one day seminars on the latest developments in the geospatial industry.
The seminars comprise industry-focused sessions presented by global experts at the forefront of geospatial innovation. With a strong emphasis on learning and application, you will return to the office with new information about the latest advances in geospatial technology and solutions.
UNIGIS UK is still accepting applictions for 2015-16.
Please contact the UNIGIS office for further information (unigis@mmu.ac.uk), or go online to download and submit the application form from www.unigis.org.
The UNIGIS UK team is out in force at the 6th World Conference on Ecological Restoration here in Manchester, UK. The theme for SER 2015 http://www.ser2015.org/ is Towards Resilient Ecosystems: Restoring the Urban, the Rural and the Wild, with several of the UNIGIS UK team members contributing papers to the Mapping, Modelling and Visualisation: GI in Ecological Restoration symposium on Tuesday 25 August 2015.
A LEADING scientist from the discipline of Geographical Information Science (GIS) has been honoured by the University.
Professor dr Henk Scholten received the title of honorary Doctor of Science from the Faculty of Science and Engineering for his extensive contributions to GIS.
In GIS, scientists combine maths and geography with key data to plan, map and model for different environmental conditions and factors.
FREE to attend Mapathon being held Tuesday 8 September at Park Inn, by Radisson, York.
The developer world has been utilising Hackathons for a number of years to rapidly create software for a common, often charitable purpose. The Mapathon adopts the same principles as a developers hackathon but, rather than software, our output will be high quality cartographic products that reveal previously unseen patterns in the data or maps the charity can use for marketing purposes.
Kim Harrell, a UNIGIS-UK student who completed her MSc Applied GIS in 2014, presented her thesis “The predictive accuracy of hotspot mapping of robbery over time and space” as a poster at The International Crime and Intelligence Analysis Conference 2015 26-27 February 2015 Manchester, England.
This paper, co-authored by Databases Unit Tutor Elias Symeonakis, reviews the statistical and ecological frameworks of assessing land degradation and desertification using vegetation index data. The development of multi-temporal analysis as a desertification assessment technique is reviewed, with a focus on how current practice has been shaped by controversy and dispute within the literature.
This award, initiated in 2008, is presented to the student, or students, nominated by their UNIGIS sites for submitting the best MSc thesis (or paper) during the academic year. This year the competition was very tight with nine excellent high quality MSc theses being considered by the review panel. In the end the panel decided to make four awards.
Professor Mark Danson presented an Invited Keynote Talk at the Annual Conference of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society http://rspsoc2014.co.uk/, hosted by the University of Aberystwyth and Environment Systems, last month. PhD researcher from Salford Lucy Walker also presented a paper on SALCA measurement of 4D forest phenology. Both papers were well received and there were around 150 registered delegates.
Dr Gina Cavan attended the Natureparif 5th annual conference in Paris, France 4-7 June 2014. The Natureparif congress was organised in partnership with the Society for Urban Ecology and the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN). The conference brought together researchers, city stakeholders, and public and private sector participants involved in urban ecology projects.
STUDENTS WELCOME GEO Business 2014, the brand new geospatial event, is set to unite industry experts from across the globe in just 2 months time at The Business Design Centre in London, UK and the organisers welcome students studying related courses to attend. Whilst attendance at the exhibition and workshops is FREE, if you register BEFORE the early bird deadline of 11th April students can attend the cutting edge conference for as little as £25.
Dr Gina Cavan is now Associate Editor for the Journal of Maps, published by Taylor and Francis. Gina will specifically focus upon articles in the area of climatology.
The Careers in the Space Industry event is being held at the iconic National Space Centre in Leicester on Friday 28th February 2014. Registration is now open.
EDINA’s Digimap has released a new service which is free until the end of the academic year. Environment Digimap is a new collection of data in the Digimap family offering Landcover Map data from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH). The service provides the 1990, 2000 and 2007 datasets at 25m and 1km resolutions for download. You can also view, annotate and print the maps online using Environment Roam. Digimap users should check out the website for more details of the new service http://digimap.edina.ac.uk/digimap/home.
Details of the annual conference of GIS Researchers UK (GISRUK) have just been posted online at http://www.glasgow.ac.uk/gisruk. Check out the website for details of how to register, submit a paper, or attend one of the pre-conference workshops.
The third meeting of the Citizen Cyberscience Summits takes place in London, 20-22 February 2014. The summit will be structured as a 3-day event that offers scientists, practitioners, enthusiasts, policy makers and citizen scientists the unique opportunity to meet and discuss citizen science and citizen cyberscience, participate in activities, and develop prototypes for new projects. Deadline for proposals is 31 December 2013. For further details check out http://cybersciencesummit.org/
Dr Gina Cavan gave an oral presentation at the 2013 International Conference on Geo-Informatics in Resource Management and Sustainable Ecosystems, Wuhan, China 8-10 November 2013. Her presentation was titled “Decision support tools for assessing regulating ecosystem services and urban climate change adaptation planning”. The abstract can be viewed following the link here.
GeoDATA 2013 is a series of FREE one day seminars throughout the UK, Dublin and, for the first time, Amsterdam and Brussels.
The seminars bring together leading spatial data professionals to share invaluable advice on how to fully utilise your investment in geographic information within the theme “Measure, Map & Manage”
Come and visit the UNIGIS Stand at Earls Court next week (28th November)
As part of the British Cartographic Society 50th Anniversary celebrations Jack Dangermond, Esri, will be giving a lecture ‘ GIS and Web Cartography’ at 11am on 25 October at the Royal Airforce Club 128 Piccadilly, London, W1J 7PY.
A scientist from the University of Salford is leading a team which will be finding out how the high levels of radiation at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine affect some of the region’s large mammals, such as deer and foxes.
Over five years, the team led by Dr Mike Wood will be investigating how much radiation the animals are exposed to and developing models which can be applied to other nuclear-impacted sites.
The independent SpaceX company has recently launched a satellite for the Canadian Cassiope project from Vandenberg Air Force base in the United States. The success of this launch paves the way for further private commercial and scientific satellite launches in the future. As space technology grows within the public domain, the emergence of new and novel remote sensing systems will not be far behind. More information may be found at http://www.spacex.com/.
The fifth assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) has now been publically released (http://www.ipcc.ch/). Anybody who is involved in any kind of environmental research should have a look at this new publication (which may be freely downloaded as a 160MB PDF file). As well as summarising the new science relating to climate change, it discusses themes such as climate change projections for the next hundred years and specific future regional changes around the world.
There is still time to submit your application to register on the programme for this year (September 2013). Please call or email the office if you have any questions.
Dr James Cheng undertook a 7 week research trip to China in June-July 2013. James travelled to several cities to deliver guest lectures and seminars to planning and GIS students, including “Measuring job accessibility” at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University; “Modelling urban growth” at Nanjing Normal University and “Spatial Regression” at Wuhan University.
Dr Mike Wood (University of Salford) has been awarded a NERC grant that will fund his radioecology research over the next 5 years.
Mike will be using ionomics and phylogenetics, coupled with state-of-the-art animal ecology and modelling techniques, to develop new methods for predicting radionuclide transfer through food chains and for modelling radiation exposure of wildlife.
The ESRI International User Conference is underway. Check out the news, highlights, featured sessions, plenary sessions and more at the UC website at http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference
The core of the Urban Observatory exhibit is GIS-driven thematic maps, which show cities across the world side-by-side, providing visualised information about urbanisation in comparative form. The exhibition showcases the interactive web platform - available at http://www.urbanobservatory.org/ - which enables you to compare and contrast the patterns of landscape or cultural values, such as population density, crime, open space and traffic, between cities across the world.
Elias Symeonakis is visiting the Australian Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics Division of the CSIRO in Perth, to carry out image processing of Landsat multi-temporal imagery. He recently spent some time in South Africa working with colleagues from the ARC and the CSIR and collecting field data related with bush encroachment and land degradation.
Dr Ilias Simeonakis is co-presenting at the Desertification and Land Degradation Conference in Belgium next week (17 & 18 June 2013). The title of his talk is : Uncoupling climatic and anthropogenic driven land degradation in Botswana.
NASA has declared that the Landsat Data Continuity Mission's on-orbit checkout is complete, and it has been renamed Landsat 8 with the hand-off of operations to the USGS! Data collected by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) onboard the spacecraft since April 11, 2013 are now available to download from EarthExplorer, GloVis, and the LandsatLook Viewer!
Dr Ilias Simeonakis from the Faculty of Science and Engineering is amongst 203 researchers who have been awarded Marie Curie Career Integration Grants. Ilias will use the funding to carry out crucial fieldwork in South Africa to support his research, which investigates monitoring of land degradation and desertification. He will work closely with Dr Steve Hoon and Dr Peter Caccetta’s team (CSIRO, Australia) to develop new approaches based on remote sensing technologies and geocomputation techniques.
The Cooperation Agreement between Intergraph and UNIGIS has been renewed. As well as providing students with the GeoMedia software the new agreement includes ERDAS Imagine software for image analysis and photogrammetry.
Thanks to Intergraph on students' behalf for this generous support for teaching and learning geospatial methodologies based on current toolsets
Dr Mike Wood (UNIGIS Programme Leader) has recently been awarded a research grant to develop new approaches to the consideration of spatial and temporal scales when undertaking assessments of the long-term impact of radioactive waste disposal. The ‘Scales for Post-Closure Assessment Scenarios (SPACE)’ project has been funded through the BIOPROTA forum (http://www.bioprota.com/), an international network of organisations supporting research on the biosphere impact of radioactive waste management. The project is being undertaken in conjunctio
Dr Ilias Simeonakis (UNIGIS Unit Tutor and MSc Supervisor) gave an oral presentation on land use change modelling with Landsat data at the 35th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment (www.isrse35.org) supported by a grant from the Universities' China Committee in London (UCCL) (http://www.gbcc.org.uk/universities-china-committee-in-london-uccl.aspx).
UNIGIS has been shortlisted for the award of "Best Overall Course" by The Students Union (Manchester Metoropolitan University). The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at MMUnion on Tuesday 7 May. The event will be streamed live via the MMU SU website: http://www.mmunion.co.uk/. Check back here on the day to follow all the action live!
UNIGIS UK will be attending GEO-NORTH which takes place in the Reebok Stadium in Bolton (Greater Manchester) on Thursday 7 March 2013. The event runs from 9:30am - 5:30pm. Further details including free registration to attend can be found on the website: http://www.pvpubs.com/events.php
Check out the new UIA promotional video which introduces the ethos and philosophy of UNIGIS. The video also illustrates the global nature of the growing community of UNIGIS students, and how the various partner sites (co)operate.
Two papers were presented by UNIGIS tutors at the 20th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK) conference held from Wednesday 11th to Friday 13th April 2012, hosted by Lancaster University.
O.Z. Chaudhry and Mackaness, W.A (2012), Modelling Confidence in Extraction of Place Tags from Flickr, in GISRUK, 11 – 13 April, Lancaster University, UK
21 & 22 March 2012 @ Holiday Inn, London-Elstree, UK
PV Publications has now entered its third decade of organising the UK's only annual geospatial trade exhibition. We work closely with the geospatial industry to create an event that attracts an average of 500 - 700 visitors through the door over two days.
Richard Armitage, UNIGIS Tutor and Programme Leader from Salford, has been elected as a Trustee and Council Member of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society (RSPSoc) for a three year term (2011- 214)). RSPSoc is the United Kingdom’s leading learned society for earth observation and photogrammetry. It draws its membership from both the academic and commercial sectors. While based in the UK, RSPSoc draws members from around the world.
UNIGIS UK is delighted to be a co-sponsor for the GISRUK 2012 event.
The conference will be held from Wednesday 11th to Friday 13th April 2012 and is hosted by Lancaster University.
The conference will include pre-conference workshops (starting on 10th April), plenary sessions from invited keynote speakers, and oral presentation of papers in a series of parallel themed sessions. A full social programme will also feature during the conference.
The homepage of the GISRUK conference series is at:
Geomatrix’12, the International Conference on Geospatial Technologies and Applications is to take place at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) from 26th to 29th February 2012. Dr Ilias Simeonakis (UNIGIS Unit Tutor and MSc Supervisor) will present the following paper:
Symeoankis, and Pappas, 2012. MODELLING LAND COVER CHANGE IN A MEDITERRANEAN ENVIRONMENT USING A MULTI-LAYER NEURAL NETWORK MODEL AND MARKOV CHAIN ANALYSIS.
The Fourth International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services took place in Valencia, Spain between January 30 & February 4, 2012. Two papers were presented by Dr Omair Chaudhry (UNIGIS Unit Tutor & MSc Supervisor)
O.Z. Chaudhry and Mackaness, W.A (2012), Automated Extraction and Hierarchical Structuring of Flickr Tags, In Geoprocessing, 30 Jan – 4 Feb 2012, Valencia, Spain
A visualisation application has been developed by Dr. Omair Z Chaudhry in Java. This application converts flight radar (point) datasets collected at an airport into a 2D/3D visualisation of flight paths (lines or polygons) that can be visualised in Google Earth. An example Path is shown in attached image.
The annual UNIGIS International Academic Excellence Prize is awarded to students having submitted the best MSc theses during the previous academic year, accepted for graduation at one of the UNIGIS partner universities worldwide.
UIA always is proud to present this prize to the author of one of the many outstanding MSc thesis submitted every year, distinguishing and honouring these individuals for an excellent academic achievement!
Winners of the UNIGIS International Academic Excellence Prize 2
UNIGIS is delighted to welcome Dr Ilias Simeonakis to the UK teaching team. He joins us from the Department of Geography at the University of the Agean, Greece.
Ilias’ most recent research foci evolve around the application of remote sensing and GIS methods in two main scientific areas:
Mapping, monitoring and modeling of land use/cover change
Identification of land sensitivity to desertification and land degradation
Ilias will tutor the GIS in Organsations unit as well as act as supervisor to MSc Dissertation students
Entitled 'Better Mapping', these one day training seminars, featuring a number of expert presenters, introduce a range of topics and easy methods that will demonstrate how good cartographic practice can greatly improve the quality, accuracy and effectiveness of your digital and hard copy maps. Better presentation will make all the difference in getting your message across!
UNIGIS UK Intake 21 will start in mid September 2011, with the Induction Meeting being held on 9-10 September at Manchester Metropolitan University. More details of the Induction Meeting will become available in this section.
The annual MSc Workshop for registered students beginning the MSc stage of the programme will be held on Saturday 11th September at the John Dalton Building, Manchester Met. University.
The purpose of this one day event is to offer support and advise and also to expand on concepts discussed in the Resource Guide The workshop provides an opportunity for students to ask their supervisor questions and complete small group exercises to help them understand and identify good and bad MSc writing styles.
On April 26, 2011 Clark Labs and UNIGIS International were pleased to jointly announce their continued partnership to provide students with access to GIS technology.
"UNIGIS is the leading worldwide network of universities offering postgraduate Geographic Information Science and Technology education via open and distance learning. Dedicated to promoting the skills of GIS professionals, UNIGIS and its partner institutions offer internationally recognized programs of study.
The 2011 Awards Ceremony details for UNIGIS UK students are now available. For those students registered at MMU the date of this year's event will be Tuesday 19th July at 10.30am, at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. More information can be found at:
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.
UNIGIS UK has now joined Twitter - the information network made up of 140-character messages called Tweets. To access news and information about UNIGIS UK on Twitter on the web or via your mobile phone, join up and follow us on: @spatial_matters
UNIGIS UK are pleased to announce that the Association for Geographic Information - AGI - has now accepted UNIGIS into the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points scheme.
The AGI is a Friend of UNIGIS and has been a strong supporter of our activities in recent years. A major element of their support is their offer of a special annual membership arrangement for our students. This year the AGI has offered individual AGI membership to UNIGIS students for £25.85. An indication of the range of the AGI's activities can be gained by visiting their web site at:- www.agi.org.uk
Registered Students