Esri Young Scholars Award Winner for 2016 – Mr Yan Yingwei

Congratulations to Mr Yan Yingwei, from the Department of Geography who has won the Esri Young Scholars Award 2016 for his PhD work titled: ‘Investigating potential distributional changes of invasive crop pest species associated with global climate change using Geographic Information System’.

Photo_YingweiThis nation-wide competition, run annually by Esri, celebrates excellence in geospatial study, and more specifically, the creative use of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology – or smart mapping technology – to solve commercial and community issues.

Yingwei’s study aimed to secure sustainable agricultural productions and global food supply in the context of climate change and rapid human population increase. Specifically, the study involves using GIS to analyse the possible consequences of future climate change on the global distributions of invasive crop pest species; and mitigating potential pest invasion risks based on quality-controlled Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) which is a form of crowd sourcing or user-generated content.

His four-year PhD project is supervised by Associate Professor Feng Chen-Chieh, and by his thesis committee members namely, Associate Professor Wang Yi-Chen, and Professor Lu Xixi. The project generated research findings on four fronts:
(1) the overall global distributional patterns of invasive crop pest species;
(2) the spatial patterns of future distributional changes in pest species richness across different latitudes and altitudes;
(3) how temperature and precipitation variations across different regions will affect the distributional changes of the pest species; and
(4) how to utilize artificial intelligence (fuzzy logic) to assure the quality of VGI in order to better surveil crop pest invasions based on spatial crowdsourcing.

These findings may allow agricultural planners, policy and decision-makers to easily identify areas around the globe which need more attention about invasive crop pest control.

Yingwei’s enthusiasm in GIS drove him to pay attention to the Esri Young Scholars Award. As a final year PhD student, he submitted his four year’s research outcomes to Esri to compete for the award. By participating in the competition, he described himself as a young scholar with a quick uptake and an ever burning desire to outperform himself and raise his intellectual levels at every opportunity.

Yingwei will be receiving this award at the 2016 Esri User Conference in San Diego, California, this June and will have his work displayed alongside other Young Scholar winners from around the world.

Information session by the London School of Economics & Political Science

Are you planning to further your studies ?  Here is an information session by the London School of Economics & Political Science…

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a world’s leading dedicated social science institution. Founded in 1895, LSE enjoys a global reputation for academic excellence.

LSE offers 38 undergraduate (Bachelor) degrees and over 140 taught postgraduate (Master) programmes across over 30 departments or institutes. As a ‘laboratory of the social sciences’, the School’s academic profile spans a wide range of disciplines, from accounting, economics, law and management to anthropology, development, gender studies and urbanisation.

Each year LSE welcomes approximately 300 Singaporean students and has £14 million (approximately $29million SGD) of financial and merit based financial aid available to its students each year.

Details of Information Session:

Date: 12th Jan 2016

Time: 2.00pm – 3.30pm

Venue: Master’s Common, Cinnamon College, Level 3

 

Registration for Information Session:

Please register at this link: https://myaces.nus.edu.sg/ems/event_reg.jsp?eventtpctrl_seq_n=1465&evnt_c=106021

(Please RSVP as seating capacity is limited)

Excellent Training Ground with Abundant Opportunities

hong bei

“The Department of Economics provided an excellent training ground for becoming an academic. It was a great experience, not only because of the supervision of Prof Zeng, but also because of the interesting seminars, courses and opportunities for international conferences. Besides research, the programme offered us enormous opportunities to hone our teaching skills which turned out to be very useful in the job.”

Hong Bei
(PhD, NUS, 2014)
Senior Lecturer of Economics, Singapore Management University