Update: Education Tidbits
The Auburn project just won an award! The team received the Campus Technology Innovator Award for “Geospatial Mapping of the Coastal Communities of Alabama.” The project was one of 11 winners from 448 nominations for the Campus Technology Innovator Award.
—- original post 7/20/10——
Students at Auburn University are mapping infrastructure in coastal Alabama, so that after a disaster such as a hurricane, responders can work more efficiently, and perhaps reduce recovery costs by an estimated 40 percent. The project was funded in September 2009 as a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce led by faculty, but the project is entirely student-run. The students have already collected geospatial data from 67 miles of Alabama’s coastline and mapped the GIS locations of more than 9,500 infrastructure elements. There an interview with the project lead.
New York College of Health Professions, a nonprofit college, received the donation of a patent pending system for worldwide first responders based on location.
This donated patent involves Emergency Based Responders and locating them on a priority system in direct proportion to the significance of the emergency, no matter where they are in the world. These emergency responders can be used for natural disasters, health care, fire or police situations, or virtually any emergency, and through this system the appropriate responder can be matched and deployed instantly to the crisis location through the growing number of smartphones and microprocessors worldwide. “We think this Intellectual Property will broaden the College’s growing portfolio, which is now one of the largest assets of our institution of higher learning,” president Pamintuan added.
While cool tech, anything built using it would still run into local laws regarding how first responders are assigned/regulated.
- press release
A top geographer from Denver takes a job with USGS and continues on in Geospatial Intelligence at Penn State. Great seeing our best and brightest heading to USGS.
“The friends and family of Jeremy Vinyard-Houx would like to congratulate Jeremy on his recent graduation from Denver University with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and a Bachelor of Science in Geography this past June. ...[He] graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa and received the Geography Merit Award as outstanding graduate. Jeremy has accepted a position in Denver with the USGS and is continuing his studies at the graduate level with Penn State University in the Geospatial Intelligence Program.”
Chris Jones, professor of geographical information systems at Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics along with Dr Florian Twaroch, a research associate in the school, are collected data on local colloquial names of places in Wales via a website.
“The idea of the site is to get people to tell us what names they associate with a particular place they live and give us postcodes and point to it on a map.”
As part of the certification scheme in India, Central Board of Secondary Education students will have to compulsorily pass two modules of geospatial technology (GT) in class XI and XII. So far 19 schools have added the GT classes.
Rolta India Ltd has been nominated as the resource institution for the GT course and will provide assistance in various technical aspects, including teachers’ training and availability of the software.
