It is my great pleasure, to introduce our colleagues at Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand as our “GeoForAll” lab of the month. The Asian Institute of Technology promotes technological change and sustainable development in the Asian-Pacific region through higher education, research and outreach. Established in Bangkok in 1959, AIT has become a leading regional postgraduate institution and is actively working with public and private sector partners throughout the region and with some of the top universities in the world. Recognized for its multinational, multicultural ethos, the Institute operates as a self-contained international community at its campus located 40km (25 miles) north of downtown Bangkok, Thailand. More details at http://www.ait.ac.th
Thailand has a very vibrant OSGeo community. Thailand hosted the Free & Open Solutions for Geoinformatics-Asia conference in Bangkok( 2-5 December 2014)
Bringing together FOSS4G users and developers worldwide and foster closer interactions with and amongst Asian communities in order to share ideas for improving software and applications. The Bangkok conference covered all aspects of FOSS4G, Open Data and Open Standards, with a particular focus on exchanging experiences between FOSS4G users and developers and providing first-hand information on FOSS4G for developing national/local spatial data infrastructures in Asian countries. FOSS4G-Asia 2014 also commemorated ten years since the FOSS-GRASS User Conference was held at Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand between 12-14 September 2004.
The OSGeoLab@AIT was established for promote and enhance education, research and service activities in the area of Open Geospatial Science & Applications. The OSGeo software were taught in various classes including Geographic Information Systems, Web GIS Technology, Spatial Analysis Methods in GIS, Geospatial Data Processing etc. Recently the class of Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Analysis was initialized. This course aims at providing students with practical utilization of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for data manipulation, management and analysis of remote sensing images and GIS data. 50 computers in the laboratory was installed the OSGeo VM suite. More details are at http://rsgis.ait.ac.th/osgeoait/category/education/
The lab is lead by Dr.Sarawut Ninsawat (Team Leader) with Prof. Nitin K. Tripathi Dr. Marc Souris, Mr. Sanit Arunpold , Dr. Rajesh V Chowdhary , Mr. Dalower Hossain . GeoForAll lab at AIT also provide training activities such as Geospatial Analysis using Free Open Sources Software (FOSS) and PyQGIS for QGIS plugins development.
During August 2016, the workshop of GNSS & Crowdsourcing for Geospatial Data using OSM was organized for undergraduate students from 16 countries who have few background on geoinformatics. The participants learned the principle of GNSS and understand how it works. Also, they have opportunity to use GNSS receiver in AIT and analyzed the result. Furthermore, afternoon session, they will be assigned task to map the certain things in AIT and then locate and input the information via Open Street Map platform. More details of the lab are at http://rsgis.ait.ac.th/osgeoait/
The group at AIT also submitted a proposal for hosting the FOSS4G2018 conference and was passed to second stage of selection. However due to the great sadness situation of the passing away of H.M. King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, they decided to withdrawn from the selection process since it is unlikely as they cannot approach any organisation in the current situation.
GeoForAll’s mission is to make geospatial education opportunities open to all and to make sure we all work together to create global citizens contributing to the betterment of humanity. Please be our GeoAmbassadors and share these ideas with all. Open principles in education (open educational resources, free and open software, open data, open standards etc) are key for true empowerment of staff and students globally and making education and opportunities accessible to all . We look forward to working and building collaborations with all interested in this education mission. Access to quality education and opportunities is key for getting rid of extreme poverty and enabling broadly shared prosperity for all.
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is the world’s largest Geospatial ecosystem , so we welcome you to the huge network of our partners and collaborators globally from governments, industry , universities, NGOs worldwide that you can connect to expand your ideas rapidly. Open innovation is key in driving Digital Economy opportunities and we are determined to make sure that everyone benefits.
We thank Sarawut Ninsawat , Nitin Tripathi ,Marc Souris, , Sanit Arunpold , Rajesh Chowdhary , Dalower Hossain and all colleagues and students at GeoForAll lab at the AIT for their contributions to the GeoForAll initiative and look forward to working and building more collaborations with all interested on this education mission.
Best wishes,
Suchith Anand