Our colleagues Ditsuhi and Aida attended this week the 2nd UN Maps conference in the UNICTF in Valencia. 

The conference took place from 6th to 10th March and the agenda was organized around five main topics: general, use cases, innovation and technology, outreach and partnership and business. The theme of the conference was “Building Greater UN Maps Together”, with the goal of demonstrating how geospatial data and services can help to deliver the collective mandates of the UN such as addressing climate change, sustaining food systems, ensuring universal access to care and education, and ensuring peace and justice for all countries.

On Monday the exhibition was inaugurated by Michel Bergeron, Chief of Service for Geospatial, Information and Telecommunications Technologies (SGITT), this exhibition had several stands of UN collaborating partners such as 3D printed models of duty stations or a drone simulator to learn how to drive it in a real representation of a camp base. 

There were also some stands for academia, where they showcased Geotec projects, such as A-WEAR, eo4geo, symptoms or sucre and the master in Geospatial Technologies. There was a great interest in Geotec projects and some UN partners went to ask about more details.

Many participants showed interest in the master program as well. It was big excitement to meet Rohini S. Swaminathan and Laura Diaz who were keynote speakers at the GeoMundus 2019 conference held as part of the aforementioned master and a former Geotec colleague in the case of Laura.

On Wednesday, the conference topic was data management and our former colleague Andrés Muñoz gave a presentation about the routing service in the peacekeeping sites, the presentation included a demo where he showed how to get the route adjusted to supply chain roads or how to manually add constraints to the map to be avoided in the routing.

It was a great opportunity to meet all the GIS Specialists from different sectors of the UN and exchange ideas. We hope we can have future collaborations with the UN!