From time to time we have PhD students who defended his/her thesis in UJI.  The rather bizarre case is to have 5 students who defended their theses in 48 hours. We all at UJI are proud of them and of the scientific and managerial milestone that we successfully achieved last week.

Our five GEO-C (http://www.geo-c-eu) early stage researchers are now doctors! Below their final PhD manuscripts. All but one defenses were chaired by leading scientific women in their fields.

As part of a public lecture series on digitalisation at WWU Münster, Christian Kray yesterday (Nov 5, 2018) delivered a public lecture on “Participation, integration and transparency in an urban context: the benefits and pitfalls of digitalisation” (Teilhabe, Integration und Transparenz im urbanen Kontext: Digitalisierung als Chance und Gefahr).  In his lecture, he introduced the basic idea behind smart cities and gave an overview of the potential benefits and dangers that such cities hold.  He then presented the GEO-C project and some example results before focussing on location information and location privacy, the topic investigated by Mehrnaz Ataei (ESR13).  Using the lecture itself as an example scenario, he explained why location information can provide deep insights on the person who is sharing it.  Highlighting the importance of a concerted effort, he then pointed out how different stakeholders can contribute towards countering the dangers and realising the benefits of smart cities, based on the results produced by Mehrnaz Ataei.  He concluded by providing an outlook on future developments.  In the plenary question and answer session following the presentations, topics such as data protection, political implications and social scoring were discussed.

The lecture slides are available for download here and the podcast can be accessed here (both in German).

The paper of Albert Acedo (ESR04) and colleagues has been selected to be the cover of ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (Volume 7, issue 9). https://bit.ly/2IuBWkT

The citizenship place network of cities is still hidden. Although many authors foresee the spatial structure of a city theoretically, its operationalization remains constrained in urban studies. This research contributes to this discussion through the exploratory examination of the geographical relationship between a sense of place and social capital at the collective and individual level. Using spatial data collected through a web-map-based survey, we found that a sense of place and social capital spatial dimensions had a non-disjointed relationship for approximately half of the participants and showed a spatial clustering when they were aggregated. This research wants to open up the agenda for further research into exploratory place-based geography studies and sets up common ground for other socially-oriented conceptualizations or applications.

Adeoluwa Akande, a PhD researcher at NOVA IMS has been selected to serve as a mentor in the 2018 YouthMappers Research Fellowship.

The 9-month program is designed to enlist, enable, and showcase the contributions of open geospatial data for research on the resilience of vulnerable populations around the world.

Adeoluwa will be mentoring Dennis Irorere, a student of the Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria on his researched titled “Leveraging open data and geospatial technology for food security”. His study seeks to develop a platform that can be a repository for farmer’s and agricultural produce data. Furthermore, a crop cultivation map will be developed for Ondo State, one of the most influential states in Nigeria, to foster positive decision making.

All new data created during the course of this research will be open and accessible to the public using the OpenStreetMap platform and tools to ensure it is freely available for the greater public good, particularly local populations planning for the welfare and vitality of their own communities.