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.

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.

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!

Commission on RS

This is actually old news as permission to form the new Commission was granted at the AGM in July 2014, but for a number of reasons I delayed posting of it. I have had quite a few roles in the Irish Institution of Surveyors (IIS) over the years -

- Membership Secretary : dealing with membership grades, arranging professional interviews, setting up discount schemes and sitting on council.

- Editor : I stepped down as Membership Secretary when the position of Editor became vacant. The IIS had a quarterly publication called the IIS NEWS, and it was my job to scan the trade and research publications, round up articles or get people to write ones that were specific to Ireland. I would put it together and then find advertisers to pay for the printing. Also required me to sit on council.

- Treasurer:  I resigned as editor while doing my PhD and when I finished I agred to take up the role of Honourary Treasurer. Managing the accounts, revenue payments, dealing with auditor reports, reports to council at monthly meetings. I  shared this role from Oct 2012 to July 2014 with the previous treasurer as i could not get into Dublin as often as required.

- Chair of the Commission on Remote Sensing. This is my new role. I pushed for formation for this Commission because, and I am not alone in thinking this, the IIS is currently geared more towards people working in land conveyancing, construction, laser scanning or boundary surveying. Members working in Photogrammetry, GIS or other non-lidar forms of RS are not adequately represented. Outsiders assume from the low numbers of these professionals in the IIS that these members are therefore not meant to join, so they don't join, and so numbers are low, and then people think they are not meant to join, etc....it's a vicious circle.

I think it's time to change that. The IIS specifically mentions different types of Remote Sensing in the articles of association and people working in these fields should be encouraged to join and helped to have a bigger say in what happens in the Institution. The alternatives are the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI), who also specifically mention RS in their pathways to membership, the Institute of Civil Engineering Surveyors (ICES) or the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society (RSPSoc) in the UK. The word, 'surveyor' is one that probably puts people off these organisations (except obviously the RSPSoc) if they work in GIS and RS - and this is the type of issue we need to deal with in the Commission. In the SCSI they have the Geomatics division, which at least sounds slightly more inclusive as Geomatics encompasses GIS, RS and Surveying, but you're still going to be classed as a 'Chartered Surveyor' if you go down that route. People whose Degrees are in Remote Sensing might not relate to a Geomatics division.

Lots of terms - lots of things to sort out, but now the Commission is in place we can start getting members on board. One of the reasons this is going so slowly is the upcoming vote on a merger between the IIS and the SCSI.

All of this might have to be repeated in a different forum in the SCSI Geomatics Division - (that will get a separate blog post regardless of outcome) - but I had hoped to know the result so I could do a talk on this at the IEOS2014 where alot of the target audience will be in the room.

Unfortunately we won't know in time.

ERC Grant Writing Masterclass

The research support office at NUIM put on a grant writing masterclass for ERC applicants. It was very useful and I learned alot, hopefully stuff I can also apply to IRC and SFI grants in future. Good job research support. It was aimed at all levels - starter (StG), consolidator (CoG) and advanced (AdG) so there was quite a selection of people in the room, from all disciplines. I also found out that it will be nearly two years before I can apply for the starter! The requirement is a minimum of 2 years research experience from the date of graduation - but in my case I had a big wait from submission (Oct 2012), to viva (Jan 2013), to graduation (Sept 2013). That was almost a year working as (but not being paid as for all of it!) a post-doc that isn't reckonable. So although two years from my graduation is Sepember 2015, I will miss that call and therefore Sept 2016 is my first date of eligibility!

While I was bemoaning the loss of all this time (and ignoring the near impossibility of getting an ERC) it occurred to me that it might not be a bad thing at all. I will be able to present 4 years work experience as a postdoc but slip into the two years bracket (or something along those lines).

Now all I need is an idea.

And a novel methodology.

And to work in a different country first.

And 5 Journal Papers.

And at least one paper without my thesis supervisor.

And a better CV.

The mobility and CV bit aren't insurmountable, as the guest speaker, Lotte Jaspers pointed out, there have been Nobel prize winners that got turned down for it, so the idea is even more important.

Needless to say, if I get one, I'll post.

Paper published

I'm just back from holidays and I had a nice break. Even better - I found out that another paper was accepted. I had my second journal paper, MIMIC: An Innovative Methodology for Determining Mobile Laser Scanning System Point Density, published in Remote Sensing. This is another open access journal and the sister journal of Sensors, the journal that published my first paper.

That's two :)

And my h-index didn't go up! I did get quite a few new people following me on Research Gate after publishing this paper - so hopefully I'll get some citations from them.

It will be alright on the night, part 2!!

I posted a few months back about the new show John Creedon was doing, "Creedon's Weather"

and how we had been asked to bring the Falcon down to Limerick and Kerry for two studies. One was identifying areas of windfall in a forest in Limerick and the second was measuring coastal erosion at Dunbeg ringfort in Kerry. Well the show started to air last week and the forestry part was shown this week (considering we couldn't fly in the strong wind at the fort I'm guessing that will be all from us!!).

Here's a screenshot the two of us, Tim flying the expensive piece of equipment and me doing a great job as clipboard guy.

And here's the link to the full show for anyone interested. Also interviewed - Barry Fennell, Enterprise Ireland, and also the Irish representative with ESA.