The ISPRS Foundation, National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD, France) and White Elephant Travel Grants for the Nice Congress
by Marguerite Madden
The ISPRS Foundation (TIF) awarded a total of 65 Grants to partially support travel expenses of stu-dents, young professionals and geospatial practitioners from 27 countries to attend the 24th ISPRS Congress in Nice, France on 6-11 June 2022. Included in these grants were registration waivers for 38 awardees by the National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD, France).
Travel grants totaled 37,100 USD and registration waivers totaled 17,850 EUR. Three White Elephant Travel Grants of $1,250 each, honoring Professor Kennert Torlegard, were awarded to Ahmad Elalailyi, for his paper entitled, “Portable Multi-camera System: From fast tunnel mapping to semiautomatic space decomposition and cross-section extraction”, Nina Homainejad, for her paper entitled, “A voxel-based method for the three-dimensional modelling of heathland from Lidar point clouds: First results” and Hariniaina Ramiaramanana for her paper entitled, “A cognitive approach for landsystem identification using a graph database – Towards the identification of landforms in context.”
A reception for the travel grant and registration waiver recipients was generously sponsored by Trimble during the Congress. TIF greatly appreciates the efforts of Ron Bisio, TIF Trustee and Senior Vice President of Trimble Geospatial, for providing this Trimble sponsorship. Many of the recipients, TIF donors, TIF officers, ISPRS Council, Congress organizers and Trimble representative, Dr. Mohsen Miri, Senior Product Manager of Trimble Geospatial, gathered for refreshments in the open-air Congress Terrasse of the Acropolis Convention Center. Dr. Miri attended his first ISPRS Congress in 2004 in Istanbul after he finished his BSc and before he began work on his MSc. He wanted to meet the professionals from the scientific articles he was reading, but had no grant to travel to Istanbul since he was early in his studies and had no paper to submit. He and 20 other students decided to make this trip, overcame bureaucratic complications to obtain visas and traveled about 40 hours by bus to attend the Istanbul Congress. He noted, “Believe it or not, the students from that trip are now managers worldwide in different companies, professionals in institutes like NASA, and professors at universities.” He added, “Yesterday on the terrace, as the students came to me and thanked Trimble for the sponsorship, I could understand with every singe cell how difficult it was for them to pass bureaucracy, get a visa, (etc.), and how important it was to get these sponsorships, but at the same time, I was proud of seeing the future professionals in front of me.”
