Professor Wolfgang Kainz, a visiting professor at LIESMARS, won the 2020 Chinese Government Friendship Award. Prof. Kainz is a professor emeritus at the University of Vienna, Austria, president of the Austrian Cartographic Association, and the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Geo-Informatics of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. He is an internationally renowned scholar who has been working in the field of geographic information science for more than 40 years. His work is focusing on the basic research of geographic information systems. He is one of the pioneers in the study of spatial relations based on topology and ordered sets. In 2020, he won the Wang Zhizhuo Award of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. He loves China and has worked in China for a long time, which has vigorously promoted technical exchanges and cooperation in the field of remote sensing geographic information between China and the EU, and made outstanding contributions to China’s high-level talent training and scientific and technological progress in this field.
Wolfgang Kainz is a special visiting professor of the laboratory and maintains a long-term close cooperation with the laboratory. He comes to the laboratory regularly for 3 months every year. He has taught the all-English credit course Contemporary Geographic Information Technology to laboratory graduate students and international students for several consecutive years, and also participates in student guidance and research.
The Friendship Award of the Chinese Government is the highest award established by the Chinese government to commend foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to China’s modernization. It was officially established in 1991 by the State Administration of Foreign Experts authorized by the State Council.
In recent years, the laboratory has taken the lead in building the International Academy of GeoInformation Science of Wuhan University, which specializes in international high-level talent education in this discipline. It has hired more than a dozen well-known overseas experts and scholars to teach all-English credit courses. At present, there are more than 80 international students. Since the establishment of the project demonstration, the Joint Laboratory of International Cooperation in Geospatial Information Science of the Ministry of Education, which relies on the laboratory, has cooperated with the University of Chicago in the United States, the University of Texas at Dallas, the Leibniz University in Germany, the Technical University Munich, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Melbourne, Australia. Universities, the Geospatial Information and Technology Development Agency of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Thailand and other internationally renowned universities and research institutions.
