Our GANS Social Spotlight continues, showcasing the people shaping Nova Scotia’s geomatics community.

Interested in being featured? Visit: https://lnkd.in/e8enpW84
(Keep in mind, you don’t need to be a GANS member!)

This week’s spotlight features Aycha Tammour, recent graduate of the GIS-Remote Sensing Graduate Certificate program at the Centre of Geographic Sciences, NSCC.

Q: What made you decide to study geomatics?
I have a background in astrophysics (PhD) and work experience as a data scientist. I became increasingly interested in challenges related to climate change and environmental monitoring, and in the role that machine learning and AI can play in addressing them. I realized that GIS and remote sensing provided an important part of the spatial and Earth observation knowledge I needed to complement my existing technical background. The graduate certificate program at COGS was a great fit because it offered a compact, online program that I could complete while living in Ontario.

Q: What did you work on for your final project?
My capstone project was an automated end-to-end pipeline that ingests Earth Observation (EO) data for a user-provided area of interest (AOI), extracts time series data, feeds it into a machine learning forecasting model, and displays the results in a live web app. The pipeline runs automatically on a scheduled basis and is designed to be extensible and scalable, using open-source tools and open-access data. It is currently live and continues to run beyond the completion of the capstone project.

View it here: https://lnkd.in/eudm3SjR

Q: Do you have any advice for future students?
The field is undergoing a lot of change, driven by things like the abundance of data and rapid advances in AI. Embrace the change and don't let it intimidate you. Your domain knowledge and understanding of the problems you are trying to solve are still extremely valuable; technology is a tool that helps you build better solutions. It is an exciting time to be working in this space!