Congratulations to Ms. Dr. Zhao Xi on the achievement of receiving this year's James Smith Medal (http://www.spatial-accuracy.org/James_Smith_Medal). In 2012, Xi defended her PhD thesis ‘Random sets to model uncertainty in remotely sensed objects’, supervised by prof. Alfred Stein.
The James Smith medal for junior scientists (http://www.spatial-accuracy.org/James_Smith_Medal) is an award which will be handed over to Zhao Xi and she will be invited as well as a keynote speaker for this year’s Spatial Accuracy symposium.
Dr. Zhao Xi, from the Chinese Antarctic Center of Surveying and Mapping, Wuhan University, China is a specialist on uncertainty and accuracy in spatial information. She defended her PhD thesis ‘Random sets to model uncertainty in remotely sensed objects’, supervised by prof. Alfred Stein, in 2012 at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Sustainable development goals
In it she addressed spatial and spatio-temporal uncertainty with applications in vegetation and flood level monitoring at various scale levels. Her work is of a great originality, as she has been able to give a new content to spatial and spatio-temporal uncertainty. By means of her research she provided probabilistic support to the concepts of uncertainty in spatial and spatio-temporal objects. This gave a better understanding and a more solid foundation to their uncertainty. It all fits into a more general development from a pixel based towards an object based approach in remote sensing studies. After her PhD research she worked on the dynamics and uncertainty of the Antarctic ice extent. This work is still going on and is highly relevant for sustainable development goals.
Achievements
So far, Zhao Xi published 41 peer-reviewed papers, among which 24 were SCI/EI indexed. Recently, she compiled a special issue of Spatial Statistics on Regional Economy and Development: A Viewpoint and Application, together with Prof. Yong Ge from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. This all is an astonishing achievement for the short period that she has been active as a scientist.
