I participated in the “EU Science: Global Challenges, Global Collaboration” at the European Parliament in Brussels (March 4th-8th). The event brought together top scientists , ministers , MEPs, senior policymakers and industry leaders with the aim to encourage worldwide collaboration in science, to explore how Horizon 2020 can enable an effective scientific response to global challenges, and to provide an environment to build new partnerships with a view to increasing international participation in Horizon 2020.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science summarized excellently the meeting aims in her keynote speech at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-13-186_en.htm
For me it was also an excellent opportunity to interact with top scientists from other disciplines and explore new opportunities for future research collaborations. It was also a good opportunity to further build up support and collaborations for Open Geospatial Research. Over the last six months we have succeeded in establishing Open Geospatial education and research labs across the planet in 6 continents . We have now grown to 20 research labs across the world (6 in Europe, 3 in North America, 3 in South America, 4 in Asia, 3 in Africa and 1 in Australia).
Europe
• University of Nottingham, UK
• University of Girona, Spain
• University of Southampton, UK
• Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
• Newcastle University, UK
• Politecnico di Milano, Italy
South America
• Federal University of Paraná, Brazil
• São Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil [process of being established]
• National Amazonian University of Madre de Dios (UNAMAD), Peru [process of being established]
North America
• North Carolina State University, USA
• University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• University of California, Davis, USA [in process of being established]
Asia
• UNMC, Malaysia
• Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia [process of being established]
• National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG), University of the Philippines [process of being established]
• Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC), Philippines [process of being established]
Africa
• University of Pretoria ,South Africa
• Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), Kenya [process of being established]
• University of Ghana, Ghana [process of being established]
Australia
• University of Melbourne, Australia [process of being established]
The pace of growth has been much beyond our dreams and with more applications for establishing research labs from universities across the world, we are in target to establish over 100 research labs in the next three years globally. This is the biggest growth area in our Geospatial Science discipline and will have direct benefit of thousands of students across the world. Each of these research labs will keep expanding over the years with more staff and students .