Participation at European Forum Alpbach

11. September 2017
A man is sitting somewhere, looking into the camera.
The European Forum Alpbach organises annually an interdisciplinary conference in the Austrian Alps, which provides a platform for scientists, politicians and students of different disciplines coming from all over the world to discuss and exchange ideas. Scholarship holder Abebaw Andarge Gedefaw got a scholarship from the Robert Bosch Foundation to participate in this year’s forum which took place between the 16th of August and 1st of September 2017 and was dedicated to the topic “Conflict and Cooperation”.

In this conference he reflected new ideas and approaches for strengthening democracy and science, the advent of artificial intelligence in all imaginable areas of society and socio-ecological innovations. Abebaw Andarge Gedefaw highlights the networking with other professionals from all over the world as a special benefit of this Forum Alpbach.

He participated in two seminars entitled “conflict and cooperation preferences or environment” and “Global weirding? Climate change and population dynamics”. Both seminars discussed that environmental resources are vital to all aspects of a nation’s survival and need principles for cooperation and joint management.

Alpbach Forum 2017

Abebaw Andarge Gedefaw is currently a PhD student at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). His research title is “Semi-automatic extraction of information from multi-scale and multi-temporal remote sensing data to support rural land administration in Ethiopia” and his research is connceted to the EduLAND project, a cooperation between the BOKU, Debre Markos University and Bahir Dar University. In addition, the main objective will be to test the applicability of semi-automatic feature extraction algorithms to support general cadastral boundary mapping from aerial photographs and high resolution multi-scale and multi-temporal remote sensing data in peri-urban and rural areas of the Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia.

Before coming to Austria he had been teaching at the department of Geography, Surveying and Land Administration at Debre Markos University since October 2013. He served as Head of the Department of Geography for one year. Since October 2012 he was a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Population Studies at Gondar University. Furthermore, from 2009 to 2012 he had been working as a higher statistician at the Central Statistical Agency in Addis Ababa.

He got a bachelor’s degree in Geography from Bahir Dar University in 2003, a master’s degree in Population Studies from Addis Ababa University in 2008 and an MA degree in GIS, Remote Sensing and Digital Cartography from Addis Ababa University in 2012.