The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was granted accreditation for a graduate certificate and master’s degree program in CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF).
Including Illinois, 23 colleges and universities offer USGIF-accredited programs and more than 1,600 students have received a USGIF-recognized certificate. Both the certificate and master’s degree were awarded accreditation for full five-year terms.
“We are excited to be accredited by the USGIF for our online master’s degree in CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science,” said Dr. Julie Cidell, professor and head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at Illinois. “Students can acquire the skills they need in visualization, AI, data processing and data-intensive computation and know that their work will be recognized by the geointelligence community.”
Illinois has long been an academic partner of USGIF, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and New Frontiers Initiative have provided support for geospatial research and education through affiliation with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and fellowship opportunities. These accredited programs will train students to address large-scale problems through geospatial sciences and technologies, mathematical and statistical sciences, and cyberinfrastructure and computational sciences while utilizing state-of-the-art high-performance and data-intensive computing resources.
NCSA is also a member of the Taylor Geospatial Institute (TGI) Consortium and will help facilitate the Regional AI Learning System (RAILS) to accelerate geospatial science and discovery, potentially saving months of time in data processing and analysis.
“Illinois is very excited to be able to contribute to TGI by installing and operating TGI RAILS,” said William Kramer, executive director of the New Frontiers Initiative at Illinois. “The TGI organizations worked together to achieve a significant Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Illinois supplied the staff effort to acquire, install and test the system to ensure it meets TGI’s needs while TGI is funding the operational costs for the system. This collaboration is an excellent example of what TGI can accomplish with team work.”
Find out more about the newly accredited graduate certificate and master’s degree in announcements from USGIF and the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at Illinois.
ABOUT NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.