GeoMundus 2018

We cordially invite all the participants of GeoMundus 2018 to a tour around the astonishing Lisbon city center. Be ready to meet amazing people, share a drink and get into GeoMundus conference mood. The details are as follows:
When: Thursday 6th December 2018, 19:00
Where: Praça do Comércio

(Note): This is an informal session. Cost of drinks or snacks should be self-payed.

Title: Future directions in GIScience

The technical environment for GIScience is changing rapidly, with growing interest in such topics as social media, autonomous vehicles, Big Data and data science, artificial intelligence and deep learning, and urban informatics and smart cities, all of which have significant geospatial dimensions. There is also growing tension between ease-of-use on the one hand, and rigorous science on the other. I sketch some key issues that will determine how GIScience can and should develop in this increasingly challenging environment.

This year, Geomundus marks the 10th iteration of the conference. We would like to present you the visual presentation on how it got started 10 years ago and what has been its impact among the organizing students and participants.

Title: Urban Intelligence Building Blocks

A smart city is seen nowadays as a urban space that takes advantage of information and communication technologies and data science to answer todays challenges, namely to become more efficient in services and infrastructures management and also to deliver increased quality of life to the people who lives, works or visits the city, not forgetting the support to fight climate change. In this presentation we will cover the ongoing cities digital transformation process and propose a concept of urban intelligence and its building blocks that is inducing a paradigm shift leading to a vision of the city as a platform where urban planning and management is supported by urban analytics and real time data.

Title: Forecasting disease spread to reduce crop losses [Crop Disease Spread Detection-CDSD]

Title: HERE Open LocationPlatform - Discover the most Critical Data Asset for Your Business

The platform for Location intelligence - a comprehensive platform that solves the problem of fragmented and disparate data sources in a collaborative environment, enabling business to monetize their most valuable asset: data

1. Daria Luedtke, Lisa Fischell, Moses Duguru, Title: Capabilities of SAR and optical data for rapid mapping of flooding events
2. Somnath Chaudari, Title: Potential of Geospatial Mashups in Promoting Tourism Resources: A Case case-study
3. Amrit Karmacharya, Title: Utility of a sensor fusion of GPS and motion sensor in android devices in GPS deprived regions

Title: Mining Geospatial Information from Unstructured Data

Vast amounts of geographically-related multimedia data contents are nowadays available online and/or in digital formats, which has created new opportunities related to the application of spatial analysis methods within fields such as the computational social sciences and/or the digital humanities (e.g., using unstructured big data to understand how people observe their world). Examples include Wikipedia or news articles, travel diaries or blog entries, Twitter messages, or online photographs. These multimedia contents about places, crowdsourced from social sensors or available within large collections, are often of high value because they offer alternative views on places, more complete and/or up-to-date than other authoritative geospatial data sources. However, there are also several challenges in using this information, related to its unstructured and un-standardized nature (e.g., it is difficult to correctly match information in texts and/or photos to specific locations on the Earth). This talk will review the use of machine learning approaches for extracting geographical information from unstructured contents, discussing recent approaches based on deep neural networks for classifying and/or geo-referencing unstructured data, of interest to several application domains.

Title: Characterizing lineage of geographical names using public and geoparsed volunteered geographic information within a digital gazetteer service in Kenya

1. Faus Tinus Handi Feryandi, University of Bonn
    Title: UAV fixed-wing orthophotos for cadastre in Indonesia’s coastline areas: accuracy assessment
2. Alexandre Baptista, Nova IMS
    Title: giCASES: Case based learning in the field of Geographical Information
3. Bilgesu Kivrak, Tiago H. Moreira de Oliveira and Marco Painho, Nova IMS
    Title: 10 Years Of Master Of Science In Geospatial Technolgies: Development of a Web App with GeoTech Students Data

An interactive panel discussion providing a great opportunity for students interested professionally in geospatial technologies.
Attendees will get to ask our distinguished panelists questions like:
1. What are the possibilities and options for building your career in geoinformatics?
2. Should one pursue further studies (PhD), or go into the workforce after the master degree?
3. What are the critical ideas for geospatial entrepreneurs?
4. How can we influence society through GI knowledge? What are the challenges in such project?
5. What tips do you have for advancing a GI career?

Panellists include our keynote speakers, professionals, and academic leaders.

A fabulous opportunity for socializing and continuing discussion that started during the day. This year's delicious meal will take place at Pano de Boca Restaurante.
Address: R. Ramalho Ortigão, 1070-238 Lisboa
Latitude: 38°44'09.9"N
Longitude: 9°09'31.7"W
About: A cozy restaurant with a great selection of Portuguese cuisine presented in a modern and creative way, located 600 meters away from the conference venue. Website: http://www.panodeboca.pt
Unfortunately, due to budget and space constraints, only the first one hundred participants to have registered will be invited. Look for the invitation in your program when you arrive at the conference.

Title: What’s next? Analytics Everywhere Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming public infrastructure into digital things that can enhance the quality of life of citizens. But the unquestionable change for digital transformation in our cities may come from citizens themselves. The Internet of Things generate an unprecedented amount of data streams about citizen experience that is impossible to handle using traditional GIS. Mainly because the data streams usually exhibit high data rates with out-of-order arrival problems, communication loss, and they are usually noisy, incomplete, and unreliable. The research challenges are related to how we can analyze these data streams in a timely way considering computing power, storage capability, network communication, privacy, security, and energy limitations of IoT environments. In this presentation we will explore how analytics everywhere ecosystems are modernizing analytical workflows in order to allow data scientists to collect and analyze data streams as they are being transported through distributed resources such as edge, fog and cloud computing. These ecosystems will deliver new insights for improving a citizen’s ability to understand what is happening and take an action accordingly.

Title: Running user-defined functions in R on Earth observation data in cloud back-ends

1. Braundt Lau, Title: Route optimization with ArcGIS on waste management in Hong Kong
2. Berhanu Berga, Title: Spatial distribution of malaria indicators in Ethiopia in 2009-2013
3. Mr Mutaz Qafisheh, Title: Water harvesting estimation using GIS in Bani Na'im
4. Dennis Irorere (Representative: Adeoluwa Akande), Title: Strengthening Vaccination Delivery with GIS in Northern Nigeria

Title: My journey from here to HERE

Title: Using remote sensing for improving crops and ensure food security: the experience of CIMMYT

The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) is an important player in the task of facing the challenges that changes in the world’s demography, environment and climate, are posing to agriculture nowadays. Through the breeding of better-adapted wheat and maize varieties, the ultimate goal of CIMMYT is to improve livelihood and to ensure food security, especially in developing countries. A key component of the breeding process is plant phenotyping. The evaluation of relevant plant traits is essential not only to ensure higher yields, but also to design strategies that could result in plants adapted to different environments around the globe. The incorporation of remote sensing (RS) tools for plant phenotyping has boosted our capacity to evaluate large populations of germplasm for relevant and complex traits, facilitating the application of phenomics at different stages of the breeding process and helping to understand the genetic basis of the interaction between gene and environment. The fast development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has represented an excellent opportunity for plant phenotyping. These platforms have been implemented in CIMMYT for more than five years, and they have demonstrated to be effective and affordable to remotely measure traits such as canopy temperature and NDVI in thousands of wheat and maize lines. While the canopy temperature is a good predictor of yield and root function under abiotic stress, the spectral indices such as NDVI can be used for predicting traits such as yield and biomass. In this presentation, we show our latest advances in the analysis of UAV based imaging for the screening of genetic resources within the context of breeding and physiological pre-breeding. We also discuss possible upcoming innovations that are currently in the pipeline. Finally, we discuss the potential of this technology to improve the output of national breeding programs and farmers in developing countries.

This session includes 5 concurrent workshops. The aim is to provide participants with practical, hands-on exercises and activities.

Workshop 1: Urban Ecosystem Services with GIS.
Facilitator: Pedro Cabral, Assistant Professor at NOVA Information Management School
The sustainable use of natural resources is of utmost importance for mankind. In this workshop we will introduce the concept of urban Ecosystem Services (ES). Then, we will explain how urban ES can be valued, both in biophysical and monetary terms. We will refer to some tools to work with ES biophysical and economic valuations focusing on InVEST tool from Natural Capital Project. We will use a case-study to demonstrate this approach. The objective is to show how we can use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and natural capital information for sustainable urban planning. At the end of this workshop, you should be able to:
i. Understand and explain what urban ecosystem services are.
ii. Understand how we can measure and value urban ecosystem services.
iii. Use GIS and InVEST tools for quantifying ecosystem services.
iv. Understand how to integrate natural capital information into urban planning.

Workshop 2: Smart Cities and Blockchain Technology
Facilitator: Miguel de Castro Neto, Assistant Professor and the Associate Dean at NOVA Information Management School and
Henrique Carreiro, Invited Assistant Professor at NOVA Information Management School.
With a global trend of growing urban population and faced with the need of fighting climate change cities are taking advantage of the ongoing digital transformation to be more efficient in resources usage and at the same time optimize services and infrastructures management in order to provide better services and guarantee higher quality of life to the people that lives, works and visits the cities. This new reality, often referred as Smart Cities, is taking advantage of the Internet of Things, Big Data, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and many more possibilities induced by the digital transformation of urban spaces and by the city as a platform approach to create more sustainable and resilient cities. Having said that, blockchain is being seen as a disruptive technology that also in the context of smart cities will have a significant impact, either in the present business models and in new products and services that are yet to be created. In this workshop we will present blockchain, a peer-to-peer distributed ledger that is cryptographically secure, append-only, immutable, and updatable only via consensus or agreement among peers, how it works and how it is already impacting the smart city with the presentation of the major trends and potential applications.

Workshop 3: HERE Map Creator & Developer Portal
Facilitator: Pedro Conceição, Community Lead at HERE Technologies
In the first part of this workshop HERE will introduce their web-based map editing tool HERE Map Creator, where you can edit your own real-life experience of your surroundings directly into HERE Maps. You can add or update roads, routes, places and house numbers to bring accuracy and context to the digital world. Participants will be guided on how to use the Map Creator to generate content on HERE Maps. It will be also touched the partnership with Mapillary a platform to upload photos they have of a point of interest to contribute to a global database of street views of cities.

Facilitator: Juanma Anera, GIS Data Engineer II at HERE Technologies Sevilla
In the second part, participants will be introduced to HERE Developer Portal and to our APIs and SDKs for maps and location-aware web and mobile apps. Also it will be touched the HERE Freemium, a plan where you'll have everything you need to build location-aware applications. Our expansive range of APIs and SDKs are intuitive and reliable, with high transaction thresholds.

Workshop 4: Real Life Use of Geospatial Technologies in Humanitarian Responses
Facilitator: Spee Braun, consultant for Save the Children and other international humanitarian organizations
The scale and human impact of humanitarian crises in the world has reached unprecedented levels.The global capacity to respond, while growing, remains challenged to meet the needs. To more effectively protect and save lives, humanitarian organizations need accurate, timely, and easily visualized geographic information. This workshop will explore how GI is contributing - and can contribute further - to expanding the global capacity to carry out humanitarian response in accordance with global standards and in real life circumstances, carrying out the work in low-resource, rapidly changing, and/or insecure environments. By the end of the workshop, you will:
- Know about the primary uses of geospatial technologies in humanitarian responses
- Have heard stories about practical challenges and explored how these might be overcome
- Considered future possibilities for use of geospatial technologies in support of humanitarian responses

Workshop 5: Open Source Geospatial Technologies: What, Why, and How
Facilitator: Alaa Abdelfattah and Lucas Braun (second year students of the Master in Geospatial Technologies)
This workshop provides an opportunity to learn about open source geospatial tools that are popular today. The content is informed by our course work in the Master of Geospatial Technologies.
By the end of the workshop, participants will:
i. Know the definition of open source and have considered its pros and cons in GI.
ii. Know about some of the open source geospatial tools exist today, and where to find more information about them.
iii. Have personal experience developing (hands-on) with one or more open source geospatial technologies.
iv. Know about how to contribute to open source software.
v. Have considered the future of open source geospatial tools.