Andy Walz Named the 2015 UMN ESRI Development Center Student of the Year

Congratulations to Andy Walz, MGIS graduate student, who has been named the 2015 UMN ESRI Development Center Student of the Year. The Esri Development Center (EDC) program provides recognition and special status to university departments and centers that have exemplary programs focused on educating students to design and develop GIS applications using ESRI's ArcGIS for Desktop, Server, and Mobile technologies. Students in the EDC program are allowed special access to ESRI software for their projects. Andy will be automatically entered in the International EDC Student of the Year competition; the winner is selected by ESRI from all the EDCs worldwide and announced at the 2015 ESRI User Conference.

GISSO's 2015 Annual GIS Career and Networking Fair A Huge Success!

Congratulations to the GIS Student Organization (GISSO) which hosted its hugely successful annual GIS Career and Networking Fair on Monday, March 30th from 11 am to 4 pm in the Mississippi Room of Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus. GISSO members did an outstanding job organizing an excellent set of guest speakers, employer representatives, student posters and much more. The goal of this career fair is to build a bridge between GIS/Geography students and employers around the region, granting the opportunity to network, exchange job opportunities and resumes, and share research and technologies being used in both the professional and academic worlds.

Vipin Kumar delivers the eighth annual Borchert Lecture as part of the UMN Spatial Forum

Dr. Vipin Kumar, William Norris Professor and Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota, gave the eighth annual Borchert Lecture, which honors the late John Borchert, University of Minnesota Regents Professor in Geography and member of the U.S. National Academy of Science. David Borchert, one of Dr. Borchert's sons, attended the event named in honor of his father. This annual lecture features notable speakers in the area of geographic information science and this year was part of the campus-wide Spatial Forum and GIS Day celebration. Dr. Kumar's current research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and their applications in Climate/Ecosystems and Biomedical domains. He is the Lead PI of a 5-year, $10 Million project, "Understanding Climate Change - A Data Driven Approach", funded by the NSF's Expeditions in Computing program that is aimed at pushing the boundaries of computer science research. He has authored over 300 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 10 books including the widely used text book "Introduction to Parallel Computing", and "Introduction to Data Mining" both published by Addison-Wesley. Dr. Kumar's presentation, Understanding Global Change: Opportunities and Challenges for Data Driven Research, was well-attended and many excellent questions were asked by the audience. The climate and earth sciences have recently undergone a rapid transformation from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. In particular, climate and ecosystem related observations from remote sensors on satellites, as well as outputs of climate or earth system models from large-scale computational platforms, provide terabytes of temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal data. These information-rich datasets offer huge potential for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the behavior of the Earth's ecosystem and for advancing the science of global change. This talk highlighted some of the challenges in analyzing such data sets and reported on early research results.

2014 Student Recognition

Congratulations to the MGIS Solar Dream Team, Ben Gosack, Chris Martin, Molly McDonald, Michael Moore, Stephen Palka, Devon Piernot, Andy Walz, and faculty adviser, Len Kne, who won first place in ESRI's Climate Resilience App Challenge 2014 including a $10,000 prize. Six members of the team traveled to the ESRI User Conference in July to accept their award during the opening session of the conference. The group has been recognized widely for this achievement including the Star Tribune, the Wisconsin State Cartographer's Office and Government Technology magazine.

Also join me in congratulating several MGIS students who received awards or completed their degrees thus far in 2014. Kathryn Purdham and Kyle Wikstrom are the recipients of 2014 ESRI User Conference Student Assistantships. These awards are very competitive and securing one is a high achievement. Each year a UMN student is recognized as the Outstanding Student of the Year for our local ESRI Development Center. The 2014 recipient is Yiqun (Ian) Xie.

Taylor Long, MGIS program, is the graduate winner of the 2014 UMN Minnesota GIS/LIS Student Scholar Award for his GIS project, eBird Participation Mapping. Rebecca Barney, B.A. in Geography, is the undergraduate winner of the same award for her project, Creating Rebecca's Interactive Adventure Map. Both students did an outstanding job representing the University of Minnesota in the graduate and undergraduate student paper sessions at the Fall 2014 Minnesota GIS/LIS Annual Conference in early October. Taylor was awarded second place in the graduate paper competition.

Finally, congratulations to our recent 2014 graduates! For a detailed listing, visit the MGIS graduates page.

GISSO recognized at the 2013 Tony Diggs Awards Ceremony

The GIS Student Organization (GISSO) was nominated for the 2013 Tony Diggs Excellence Awards in the category of Outstanding Graduate or Professional Student Group of the Year. While the group did not win the top award in this category, they were recognized for their service to the University along with a field of an impressive student organizations. GISSO has sponsored and organized many GIS events and outreach efforts, their most prominent being the annual GIS Networking and Career Fair. Under the leadership of President Taylor Long and Vice President Molly McDonald this student group has provided outstanding service to the community and the University along with the support of its other dedicated officers and membership. To learn more about this outstanding student organization including becoming a member, visit the GISSO web site.

Taylor Long captures two awards in U-Spatial Mapping Prize Competition

Taylor Long won two awards in the U-Spatial Mapping Prize Competition; prizes were made possible by a generous gift from U of M alumnus Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri. Taylor was awarded the "Best Cartography" prize, a $500 cash award, for his map, Madison Fork and Environs; he also won "Best Overall Submissions" for his maps, Madison Fork and Environs and e-Bird Participation in 2012, for which he was awarded an all-expense paid trip to the Esri GeoDesign Summit.

Congratulations to 2014 U-Spatial Poster Competition Winners!

Congratulations to the winners of the U-Spatial Poster Competition held at the 2014 GIS Networking and Career Fair! Tyler Kaebisch won first place for his poster LiDAR Derived Lake Boundaries. Taylor Long captured second place for eBird Participation in 2012: Citizen Science Aides Avian Research, while Ben Gosack took third place for Urban Tree Assessment for the University of Minnesota: Capturing Urban Tree Measurements from LiDAR Data. Honorable mention to MGIS students, Corey Betchwars, Teresa Lewandowski, Yiwen Li, and Joseph Mueller for their outstanding entries.