With generous sponsorship of ESRI, GIScience 2018 would like to congratulate the 8 winners of ESRI GIScience 2018 Student Travel Awards. Each student receives between $375 to $750 travel support to help with attendance at GIScience 2018, based on both demonstrated need and academic excellence. All award winners have papers in the GIScience 2018 program. Congratulations to all of our winners!
Alina Ristea
Alina Ristea graduated from the University of Bucharest in 2011 with a Bachelor degree in Geography – Cartography and Cadastral Elements. In 2013 she was awarded with a Master diploma in Geographical Information Systems from the same University. Currently she is a third year PhD student in the Department of Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg, Austria, researching the integration and evaluation of social media data into crime prediction models, under the supervision of Professor Michael Leitner. The overall goal of her PhD research is to evaluate the impact that social media information has on the accuracy of forecasting crime for different event occurrences. Her interests include spatial statistics, spatial crime analysis, predictive analytics, social media patterns and data mining.
Aline Menin
Aline has a degree in Computer Science by Federal University of Southern Border (UFFS), Brazil, since 2014. She has a Master degree in Computer Science by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, since 2016, in which she worked on the assessment of immersive serious games. Currently, she is working with geovisualization of individual mobility data as a Ph.D. student at Grenoble Computing Laboratory (Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble – LIG), in France. Her research interests include virtual and augmented reality, non-conventional interaction techniques, geovisualization, information visualization, and persuasive interfaces.
Gengchen Mai
Gengchen Mai is currently a 1st year PhD student at Space and Time for Knowledge Organisation Lab, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara. His PhD adviser is Prof. Krzysztof Janowicz. He got my B.S. Degree in Geographic Information System from School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University and M.A. degree from UCSB Geography. His research mainly focuses on Machine Learning/Data Mining, Geographic Data/Knowledge Base, Geographic Information Retrieval, Geospatial Semantics and Nature language Processing
Laure De Cock
Laure is a young researcher of the Department of Geography at Ghent University in Belgium. Her research focuses on adaptive indoor route guidance. In her PhD she combines space syntax, building complexity, user perception and route communication. In her first year on the job, she made a website to convey a user study, which is now ready to be spread.
Madiha Yousaf
Madiha Yousaf graduated from COMSATS institute of information technology in Islamabad, 
Pakistan in July 2015. Her subject majors are computer science. She has started working as a PhD researcher at the Otto-Friedrich university of Bamberg, Germany on 1st April 2017. Previously she was employed as a lecturer in the computer science department of COMSATS institute of information technology in Islamabad. Her research interest are in understanding what context is and how it effects the interpretation of natural language (with respect to place descriptions).
Nina Vanhaeren
Bio and photo to come.
Yan Li
Yan Li is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. His general research interest is on spatial computing, data mining, and machine learning. Currently, he is working on detecting patterns resulting from spatial heterogeneity, such as local co-location pattern, as well as routing according to historical on-board engine diagnostic data. He got his bachelor’s degree in Remote Sensing at Wuhan University, China, and master’s degree in Geography at University of Tennessee – Knoxville.
Yi Lu
Yi Lu is a PhD student in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES), University of New South Wales. His main research interests are land use change models, spatial analysis, and planning support systems.