Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar: Ashok Peddi, ISEGI, New University of Lisbon, Lisbon.

The Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholarship programme at Institute of Statistics and Information management, ISEGI, was a truly good experience to me and I am very thankful to Erasmus Mundus and the EU scholarship I received for the opportunity to be part of the master's programme in Geospatial Technologies. The best was all I learned from ISEGI professors about course planning, teaching and research methods.

Professor Marco Painho was a very generous and attentive host. He invited me to the Classes in Remote Sensing and GIS Applications so I could share with Erasmus Mundus students about my experience in Remote Sensing and GIS. The course was so well organized that I ended up taking notes of everything, as if I were one of the students!

I am grateful to professors Mario Caetano (Remote Sensing) and Pedro Cabral (GIS Applications) for inviting me to work with their students. That kept me quite busy because I had the chance to teach every week. I learned quite a lot from the questions and comments the students made during and after the lectures, and I was able to update myself in not only GIS and Remote Sensing but also other subjects. I am really thankful to Professor Pedro Cabral for his encouragement and suggestions about the methods and techniques in teaching GIS Applications.

I spent most of my time at Lab New Technologies (LabNT), ISEGI doing research for a paper “On Automatic Extraction of Salt Pans in Mozambique using Remote Sensing”. This is an interesting subject to me as I have been working on remote Sensing since 2009. The study on salt pans new to me and I am very much excited to work with new tools like IDRISI and QGIS. I have used QGIS to calculate Salt Pan Index and IDRISI for Segmentation and Classification .I am very much thankful to Professor Marco Painho for his guidance, help and support about this project during the whole period.

I found several authors and publications at ISEGI's library that greatly benefit my research. Personal access to the library and the conversations I had with Prof. Marco Painho and GIS and Remote Sensing professors &researchers at ISEGI was key to taking my research to a higher level. I expect to finish my paper in a few months to submit them for peer review at indexed journals.

It is my pleasure to inform that I have presented a paper entitled “Development of strata based Phytosociological Data Analysis system using Open source GIS” at Geomundus 2011 which was held at Institute of Geoinformatics ,University of Munster, Munster, Germany from 27-29th October 2011(http://geomundus.org/).I am thankful to ISEGI for partial Financial Support to attend this conference.

My special thanks to Mr. Hugo Martins, Web GIS Developer for his suggestions and directions towards opens source GIS technologies.

Last but not least, it is my pleasure that I was with the team of LabNT, ISEGI. My heartfelt thanks to each and every team member as everybody is cooperative in terms of technical as well as non-technical. LabNT is always active, innovative and helpful in activities I was involved. I was very impressed by the way they work, they celebrate, they think.

Time flew by during the programme and I wish I could've stayed at Lisbon at least a few more weeks, because I felt settled in Lisbon and knew my way around at the university after the first two weeks. But it offered me such a quality personal experience and such an intense and worthy academic and professional experience that the four months I spent at ISEGI, Lisbon, Portugal have already changed the way I envision my work ahead at my home country and the kind of quality work that is possible to achieve.

Again, thank you very much to you, Professor Marco Painho, and EU scholarship for making it possible for me to participate in this visiting scholar programme 2011.

Yours sincerely, Ashok Peddi