The CGA is proud to congratulate our very own director, Adriaan van Niekerk, for his inaugural lecture, titled “Data Science: Opportunity or threat”, that took place at the University of Stellenbosch last week.
Adriaan’s focus is on the development and application of geographical information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (Earth observation) techniques to support decisions around land use, bio-geographical, environmental, agricultural, water and socio-economic problems. Getting even more specific, most of his resent research has been on the use of expert systems and machine learning for effectively extracting useful information from large volumes of remotely sensed imagery, with an emphasis on applications in agriculture and forestry.
With his inaugural lecture, titled “Data Science: Opportunity or threat?”, Adriaan considered data science from a geospatial perspective. He started by comparing how the two disciplines have developed in parallel over the last six decades and then provided some examples of how he’s made use of machine learning in his own research. As alluded to in the lecture title, he reflected on the opportunities and risks that machine learning holds for the greater field of science, but geospatial science in particular:
“Despite the opportunities that data science offer, machine learning is not the silver bullet that will solve all geospatial challenges. We ought to be realistic about what can be achieved with supervised learning and earnestly consider alternative (e.g. knowledge-based) approaches. More importantly, when machine learning succeeds, we must always ask how it succeeded. Although machine learning coupled with EO has been a gift that keeps on giving from a research perspective, the value of machine learning for operational EO solutions has yet to be realised. The blind, hit-and-miss, case-study approach that has become the norm in machine learning research is a threat to meaningful scientific discovery and it is unlikely to produce practical solutions to the many geospatial challenges we are facing.”
