Shih Hsin University Team Wins SuperGIS Youth Award 2017

Supergeo’s SuperGIS Youth Award is a long-standing annual competition aimed at encouraging college students to solve problems using geospatial technologies. The event not only provides opportunities for students and teachers to discuss their ideas on GIS, but also offers them a platform for sharing their results. The team from Shih Hsin University has repeated its great performance in 2016 to once again win the award in 2017.

This year, the SuperGIS Youth Award also attracted participation by students from different disciplines, including tourism, leisure management and logistics management. Inspired by crime mapping, the winning team introduced a project called ‘Safe Taipei’ aimed at analysing the spatial relationships between crime hotspots and the factors that might reduce the crime rate, such as police stations, CCTV cameras, street lamps, convenience stores, etc. Such data is accessible on open-data platforms like Data.Taipei and DATA.GOV.TW. After calculating the buffer and overlaying maps together, the team identified the best factors to reduce the crime rate in Taipei as being police stations and CCTV cameras. This project won praise from the judging panel for utilising open data effectively and finding useful results that can contribute to the crime prevention policy in the future. Through the power of GIS, even a simple idea can lead to an insightful conclusion. In the future, Supergeo will continue to organise competitions to provoke geospatial thinking and promote the capability of GIS.