NEWS
The 9th Digital Earth Summit was successfully held in Chennai, India during 6th-8th September 2022. The theme of the Summit is “Digital Earth to Bridge Digital Divide for Attainment of Sustainable Development Goals”. The Summit was organized by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and hosted by Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University, Chennai, India.
This summit brought together distinguished experts and eminent researchers from various fields including remote sensing, civil and environmental engineering, information technology and infrastructure development across the world. More than 200 participants from various institutes participated during this three-day summit.
The summit was inaugurated with lamp lighting followed by Tamil Thai Vaazhthu, the state anthem of Tamil Nadu and presided by Dr. Alessandro Annoni, President, ISDE, Italy; Dr. Velraj, VC- Anna University, Chennai; Dr. Shailesh Nayak, Director, NIAS, Former secretary of MoES, GoI; Dr, Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed Ghouse, VP- ISDE; and Dr. D. Thirumulaivasan, Director-IRS, Anna University, Chennai.
A total of 6 plenary talks were delivered by eminent researchers and academicians in three plenary sessions conducted on various topics related to Earth observation, Remote Sensing, Big data, Digital resilience, etc. Eight technical sessions on different sub-themes of the summit were conducted with a total of 45 technical paper presentations by researchers during this 3-days summit.
Youth Forum Events
One of the special attractions of the Digital Earth Summit is the active participation of large number youth mainly from Bachelors and Masters programmes in Geospatial technology. Exclusive events for these youth were conducted by the Youth volunteers, to promote the Digital Earth technology awareness in youth community. The events include use of Digital Earth technologies like satellite data, spatial analysis, geolocations for solving simple problems and as well discussion on promoting ideas in young minds through events like Geopreneur.
Globe Quest
Globe Quest is an event with combination of technical and non-technical rounds. First two rounds are knock-out rounds and the final round is to determine the winners. In the first round, a series of quiz will be displayed in the screen one by one. These quizzes are taken from different domains such as Geoinformatics, Movies, Cryptocurrencies etc. For each question 10 seconds was given to the participants. Participants can participate either as a group or take part individually. participants were not allowed to use phones or laptops for finding the answers. Each correct answer carries 1 mark throughout the event. Top 10 rankers were selected for the next round.
In the second round a series of videos will be played and questions will be asked from the videos one by one. Top 5 rankers were selected to the final round. In the final round, a jigsaw puzzle was given to the participants to solve. After the puzzle has been solved, questions present behind the solved puzzle were answered. The participants with the highest marks in the final round are be declared as the winners.
Find Me
Find me is a technical event which is played like treasure hunt but not physically and it can be played in teams or individually. The event is improvised to be played using mobile phone with internet connection, with already available apps as the playground. The event consists of only one round, finding the right answers for each hint and using those found answers to open a puzzle. Few hints directly use the technical knowledge of Geoinformatics. Finding all the puzzles leads to the treasure. The event goes with finding a place or length or distance between points etc, in google maps, google earth; also translate and lens are helpful in finding the answer. Each of the mentioned app has special features like measure, grids, geographic coordinates etc. The participants have to find answers for the hints using all those tools. Even they are given the liberty to use any of online tools if required.
The event got attention of 57 members. Ten teams participated with keen interest in the hunt. The hints required logical analysis and participants felt difficult to find solution to the hints. The hints as well as the key to puzzle needs presence of mind and time management skills. Unfortunately, no team could locate he treasure and the winner was selected based on the maximum number of hints they found out. The time allotted for the event also played an important role in the float of the event. Though the stipulated time is perfect, more time would have the bought the key to participants play well.
GeoPreneur
This event aims at inculcating an aptitude for becoming a successful entrepreneur. The participants were given a hypothetical scenario and asked to market their company to investors and provide a sustainable and cost effective solutions for the challenges faced by their company. The following problem was assigned to participants for their solution using Digital Earth technologies.
Prompt: You are the CEO of a Multi-National Conglomerate based in India, the latest IPCC report has listed the factories running under your company's name as one of the largest contributor's to pollution in the region. The R&D team has come up with certain GIS based tools to make transportation quicker, locate ideal wastelands. You need funds and investors to launch this technology on a larger scale, market to get the required funds.
The event had 7 participants each of whom gave Digital Earth based solutions to market their product in the best way to receive hedge funds.
G - Link
An event that saw 20+ enthusiastic teams contesting over two rounds. The participants had to connect the pictures displayed on the screen to find the hidden term relating to GIS and Remote Sensing in 30 seconds. The 5 top performing teams in round 1 qualified for the finals where they had to guess 10 words with the team that had the most number of right answers winning the event.
