Esri Announces Grant Worth $10 M to African Universities and other Education GIS News
Esri has made a commitment worth $10 million to support 100 African universities in teaching GIS.
Mr Dean Angelides, Corporate Director, International Operations, of ESRI who announced the initiative at a meeting with Ghanaian universities officials in Accra, said the modalities are being worked out.
The system could be used to solve virtually every development challenge, which would enable lecturers in Ghana and students to contribute to high level research in the geo-spatial systems revolution that is currently engulfing the world.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a two-year grant of nearly $250,000 to Moira Zellner, assistant professor of urban planning and policy [University of Illionois at Chicago], and a team of researchers in urban planning, computer science, education and biology, to devise visualization tools that will help stakeholders manage water resources in the Chicago region.
"Government agencies use stakeholder committees to ensure that diverse interests are represented," Zellner said. But the committee members “often are not trained to understand the tools that represent the complexity of human-environmental issues.”
Zellner’s team will determine how two visualization tools -- agent-based modeling and geographic information systems -- can help citizens understand how the interactions between land and water management practices can affect the availability of water.
- Newswise
