1. Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar: Ashok Peddi, ISEGI, New
University of Lisbon, Lisbon.
The Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholarship programme at Institute of Statistics and
Information management, ISEGI, was a truly good experience to me and I am very
thankful to Erasmus Mundus and the EU scholarship I received for the opportunity to be
part of the master's programme in Geospatial Technologies. The best was all I learned
from ISEGI professors about course planning, teaching and research methods.
Professor Marco Painho was a very generous and attentive host. He invited me to the
Classes in Remote Sensing and GIS Applications so I could share with Erasmus Mundus
students about my experience in Remote Sensing and GIS. The course was so well
organized that I ended up taking notes of everything, as if I were one of the students!
I am grateful to professors Mario Caetano (Remote Sensing) and Pedro Cabral (GIS
Applications) for inviting me to work with their students. That kept me quite busy
because I had the chance to teach every week. I learned quite a lot from the questions
and comments the students made during and after the lectures, and I was able to
update myself in not only GIS and Remote Sensing but also other subjects. I am really
thankful to Professor Pedro Cabral for his encouragement and suggestions about the
methods and techniques in teaching GIS Applications.
I spent most of my time at Lab New Technologies (LabNT), ISEGI doing research for a
paper “On Automatic Extraction of Salt Pans in Mozambique using Remote Sensing”.
This is an interesting subject to me as I have been working on remote Sensing since
2009. The study on salt pans new to me and I am very much excited to work with new
tools like IDRISI and QGIS. I have used QGIS to calculate Salt Pan Index and IDRISI for
Segmentation and Classification .I am very much thankful to Professor Marco Painho for
his guidance, help and support about this project during the whole period.
I found several authors and publications at ISEGI's library that greatly benefit my
research. Personal access to the library and the conversations I had with Prof. Marco
Painho andGIS and Remote Sensing professors &researchers at ISEGI was key to taking
my research to a higher level. I expect to finish my paper in a few months to submit
them for peer review at indexed journals.
It is my pleasure to inform that I have presented a paper entitled “Development of
strata based Phytosociological Data Analysis system using Open source GIS” at
Geomundus 2011 which was held at Institute of Geoinformatics ,University of
Munster,Munster, Germany from 27-29th October 2011(http://geomundus.org/).I am
thankful to ISEGI for partial Financial Support to attend this conference.

2. My special thanks to Mr. HugoMartins, Web GIS Developer for his suggestions and
directions towards opens source GIS technologies.
Last but not least, it is my pleasure that I was with the team of LabNT, ISEGI. My
heartfelt thanks to each and every team member as everybody is cooperative in terms
of technical as well as non-technical. LabNT is always active, innovative and helpful in
activities I was involved. I was very impressed by the way they work, they celebrate,
they think.
Time flew by during the programme and I wish I could've stayed at Lisbon at least a few
more weeks, because I felt settled in Lisbon and knew my way around at the university
after the first two weeks. But it offered me such a quality personal experience and such
an intense and worthy academic and professional experience that the four months I
spent at ISEGI, Lisbon,Portugal have already changed the way I envision my work ahead
at my home country and the kind of quality work that is possible to achieve.
Again, thank you very much to you, Professor Marco Painho, and EU scholarship for
making it possible for me to participate in this visiting scholar programme 2011.
Yours sincerely,
Ashok Peddi