Following the series of previous industry talks , the Chief of the UN Data Management Unit, Dra. Laura Díaz visited GEOTEC on February 16 to give an industry talk to the students of the 2023-2024 edition of the Erasmus Mundus Master in Geospatial Technologies.

Laura presented the Client Solutions Delivery Section (CSDS) at UN Global Service Center, as a provider of supply technology for UN Systems globally. In particular, CSDS provides corporate solutions for geospatial data and innovate technologies to UN field missions. Of course, they use and manage lots of geospatial data, maps and satellite images on a daily basis.

Field missions require special maps. In places where peace is at risk, authoritative data is often missing or of insufficient quality. Therefore, one of the key products is the UN Maps, in combination with UN Geoportal, to create and serve its data sets, such as street maps, image maps, directions, operation support (e.g. for UN resources and personal in the area). These geospatial data sets are used for patrolling, planning and reporting in the field or in the office.

Another line of work is related to data management in general, but especially from the perspective of the IoT Data Pipelines concept. Laura explained the UN’s vision of a data pipeline, made up of a series of tasks to capture, process, store, analyse and use data.

Related to the above topics, Laura presented many opportunities for students to pick a topic for their master’s thesis in the future. Examples are many tasks related to GeoAI, i.e. the fusion of IA and GIS capabilities, such as object detection in satellite images using different techniques, groundwater services (classification, analysis, estimation of the best places to drill wells, etc.), flood impact analysis, analysis noise impact, and air pollution analysis. AI for data quality control was also identified as a potential topic. Data quality is not a very popular topic, but it is extremely necessary to realize the vision of the data pipeline. In this sense, things like identifying data quality criteria without human intervention or automatically suggesting corrective actions to create data of sufficient quality are priorities for the UN, especially since having data of good quality and form is essential to maintain peace in field missions.

Thank you Laura for giving a great industry talk to our Master students and GEOTEC members.