Monday 13 October 2014

Milan MC Meeting

The 1st COST Optimise Workshop was held in Milan last week. Very enjoyable trip, I heard about lots of interesting research and hardware and I met numerous interesting people who are working with UAVs and hysperspectral sensors.

Despite a rough start where the GPS on my phone shafted me - again (honestly I was this





close before it started working), I found my way to the hotel and then went to University of Milan, Bicocca. One and a half days of the workshop and a management committee meeting on the final day. I spoke to people using the Rikola, Headwall and Cubert hyperspectral sensors. Ocean Optics spectrometers seem to be a popular choice too.



Lots of people with electronic engineering experience who could knock together the workings of a UAV in the same amount of time it takes me to get our UAV instructions laminated. I got some good info on correction techniques for scan line hyperspectral sensors on board UAVs - a software package called "Parse" is the tool to have. However it is not showing up on Google so I better try and track down the person who recommended it as they also said there was some interesting literature on their site.

A very interesting meeting.




Monday 6 October 2014

IEOS2014 registration open and draft programme released

http://ieos2014.com/

Is coming along nicely. We opened registration last week and we have already got around 40 people. This is the first symposium I have been involved in organising so I don't know what the attrition rate of "registered" V "show up on the day" is but I'm guessing it's usually pretty high judging from all the unclaimed badges that you see on the registration desk at the end of most conferences. Plus this conference is free so they lose nothing if they don't show up.

We uploaded an early draft of the programme here and we already have a great line-up of keynote speakers confirmed. Ed Parsons from Google, Olly Guinan from Skybox and Peter Baumann from Jacobs University. We are waiting on confirmation from one more keynote speaker - hopefully Gordon Campbell from ESA and about 5 others who will play a big role in the round-table discussion.




Friday 3 October 2014

GIScience 2014

Just back this week from a trip to the beautiful city of Vienna - I was attending GISCience 2014 with Chris Brunsdon and Martin Charlton. Some of our work for the ESPON project was submitted as an extended abstract entitled "Data Imputation in Short-Run Space-Time series – a Bayesian Approach" to the conference and it was presented last Wednesday at GIScience 2014.






Some very interesting talks and I met alot of new people.  And, happily, some old faces too! The first time at a conference that I've met some people that I had worked with, Usually you get to recognise a few familiar faces but this time these were people I had worked with for a number of years who had since moved on. Maryam and Christian were there presenting, "Modularity and spectral regional clustering by commuter flows" , and Urska was there presenting, "Edge-based communities for identification of functional regions in a taxi flow network ".

And Vienna, wow - what a city! You could be forgiven for thinking that a King or Queen lived on every street the buildings were that impressive. I mean this photo shows it is no Henry Street!


About Me

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My name is Conor. I am a Lecturer at the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. These few lines will (hopefully) chart my progress through academia and the world of research.