A Refreshing Approach to Geomatics
The conference committee of the GIM International Summit has announced a refreshing list of inspiring and original speakers who will give a keynote at the inaugural edition of the event. Among the confirmed speakers is Hans Rosling, the world’s most famous statistician and one of the most influential public speakers on global change. Other top speakers are Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist of Google, and Morten Jerven, the author of Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It and his latest work Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong.
The list of speakers further includes Daniel Steudler of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo), Vanessa Watson of the African Center for Cities, Joyeeta Gupta of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Pier Vellinga, professor of climate change at Wageningen University and at the VU University Amsterdam, and Geert Bouckaert, president of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS).
Three interactive days in Amsterdam
The input from the keynotes and the outcomes of the interactive workshops will be summarised in the GIM International Summit Declaration, which will be officially signed and subsequently submitted to high-level and global policymaking institutes. With speakers and presenters from outside the traditional geomatics world, all of whom are true experts in their own field, the conference committee aims to create a closer link between society’s needs and geospatial solutions.
The workshop programme is taking shape, with topics that are well connected with the keynotes. For example, one workshop will be hosted by Pierre-Philippe Mathieu, Earth Observation Applications Engineer in the Earth Observation Science & Applications Department of the European Space Agency. Mathieu and the workshop participants will explore together how data – in particular from Copernicus satellites – can support climate science, adaptation, mitigation and disaster risk management. In another workshop, Prof Arnold Bregt of the Wageningen University and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions will encourage and inspire delegates to join him in exploring the future role of geoinformation from the perspective of urban planning and in identifying gaps in the current state of technology.
The GIM International Summit will culminate on Friday 12 February in the participants’ constructive thoughts and ideas being summarised in a final declaration. This document will then be officially presented to an influential international policymaker (whose name will be revealed at a later date).
More information on the workshops can be found here
For a comprehensive overview of the full conference programme, see here
