Udupi: The two-day national conference on Geospatial Information and Technology Advancement (GITA 2K15), organized jointly by the Departments of Civil Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering of SMV Institute of Technology and Management (SMVITM) began at Bantakal in Udupi district on Friday.
A release by the Institute here said, inaugurating the conference, Uday Raj, Director, Regional Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO, Bengaluru, spoke about the strategic importance of developing indigenous geospatial technologies. He spoke on how ISRO, with the recent launch of its GSAT-6 and Astrosat satellites, helped to make the country self-reliant in having location-oriented indigenous satellites that would provided vital geospatial information required for strategic planning.
Speaking as the guest of honour, Nagesh Kumar D., Chairman, Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Bengaluru, said extracting useful and relevant information from the huge amount of data provided by the geospatial technologies and using the extracted information effectively for the betterment of areas such as agriculture, detection of water resources, determining the quantity of water etc. were big challenges for a vast country such as India.
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Thirumaleshwara Bhat, Principal of the Institute, welcomed the gathering. Ratnakumar, Secretary of SSVM Education Trust, Udupi presided over the inaugural function. Ganesha A., Principal and Dean (Academics) of the Institute, proposed a vote of thanks.
T.V. Ramachandra, Energy & Wetlands Research Group, IISc., H. Gangadhara Bhat, Coordinator of Geo-informatics, Mangalore University; Dwarakesh, Head of Department of Applied Mechanics, NITK- Surathkal; Subba Rao, Professor, B. Naveenachandra, AGM, BSNL, Mangaluru, and Radhakrishna S. Aithal, Director of SMVITM were present.
The inaugural function was followed by a keynote address on ‘Advancements in Geospatial Techniques’ by Dr. Uday Raj and a talk on ‘GPS in watershed management’ by Dr. Nagesh Kumar. Bharath Aithal, Senior Research Associate, IISc., delivered a guest lecture on Smart Cities.
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In four technical sessions under the categories Geospatial Technologies, Technology Advancements and Geospatial Applications, 19 papers were presented on the first day of the conference.