April 25, 2014, by Deepa Kumari Veerasingam
Coffee-and-Cake Session: The Search for Malaysian Airlines MH370
The Graduate School held its monthly Coffee-and-Cake Session on Friday 25 April 2014. The session included a talk on “The Search for Malaysian Airlines MH370” by Dr Tuong-Thuy Vu, Associate Professor from the School of Geography, Faculty of Science.
Dr Tuong-Thuy Vu
A geospatial scientist by training and research, Dr Vu, whose area of research includes disaster responses and crowd-sourcing, is one of the worldwide volunteer that was called up by the international organisation DigitalGlobe to help locate the missing Boeing 777 using the Earth Observation satellite image.
DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of high-resolution remote sensing images, has activated FirstLook – an online subscription service for emergency management which delivers web-based access to pre and post event imagery of world disasters to almost any desktop or web-based mapping platform. It is used by emergency-response agencies in natural disasters, man-made crises and human interest scenario.
Dr Vu’s Open-Source Geospatial Development (OSGEO) research lab in the School of Geography has been active in research using Earth Observation images to support disaster and emergency responses. The on-going activity focuses in integrating crowd-sourced data information to supplement/validate the analysed satellite images, which is in line with current effort by DigitalGlobe in response to the Philippines Haiyan typhoon and the MH370 search.
His OSGEO research lab is also expanding research on the quality of crowd-sourced data in collaboration with Nottingham Geospatial Institute and the Crops for the Future Research Centre (CFFRC).
More than 30 postgraduate students attended the session. The talk provided a very interesting and valuable insight at how searches for the missing aircraft are being conducted and investigated by using the latest crowd-sourcing techniques for satellite image interpretation, in the hope of pinpointing any clues or wreckage.
MH370 whereabouts has remained a mystery, but experts believed it crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, off the Australian coast. Ever since, the Malaysian and Australian governments, with help from nations across the globe, have been searching for the flight to find out what happened to it and the passengers on board.
#PrayForMH370
#PrayForMH370
[…] Dr Tuong Thuy Vu gave a talk at The Graduate School on Friday 25 April 2014 outlining how the Geography team actively participated in the search for MH370 using Earth Observation images following the call for joining global force in tomnod.com by Digital Globe. Under the supervision of Dr. Tuong-Thuy Vu, Geography students have had a chance to contribute what they have studied in a real life event. By invitation of the Graduate School, Dr. Vu gave a talk on how such technologies make the search possible and the team experiences in the search. Pictures of the event are posted here. http://blogs.nottingham.edu.my/postgraduate/2014/04/25/coffee-and-cake-session-the-search-for-malays… […]