HERE Summer School 2019 Poznań is an event that brought together more than 40 students and members of the Here community across Eastern and Central Europe. 6 days were spent on seminars, lectures, meetings and projects in the field of geoinformation and cartography. We also had enough time to enjoy the beautiful city of Poznan and get to know each other.
During HERE Summer School 2019 in Poznań, I was surrounded by true professionals. Vyacheslav Kharchenko, despite his very young age, has good programming skills and was able to get acquainted with the most basic GIS platforms. Pavel Lukyanov – a person who’s worked with almost all GIS related programs and did everything quickly and efficiently during the project preparations. Denis Ivanov – chief representative of Ukraine from HERE Technologies, a person who, in my opinion, knows how to convey information by explaining everything and how to organize work regardless of the number of participants.
Summer school program
First of all, I want to emphasize that people have come to this camp in different ways, and I will devote a whole section of the blog to this. Here Summer School’s program was very diverse and full of events.
The practical part included the workshops held at the Adam Mickiewicz University. We also visited s – Yanoshik the Polish partner of HERE Technologies, attended lectures on the use of such products as HERE Map creator, XYZ, and API, became spectators of various sporting events, went on a city quest, participated in kayaking.
Workshops
Frankly speaking, I was not familiar with the format of workshops. So what does it represent?
During the check-in phase, a few days before arriving in Poland, we were asked to fill an application form about what topics we’d find interesting and what workshops we would love to visit, for example, sports and tourism, urban mobility, smart cities, etc. I got into the traffic and logistics team. Upon arrival to Poland, we were given welcome packages where everyone also got their own badge with their name and the name of the workshop to be visited on it. It also contained contacts of the organizers, workshop leaders, and the camp events list on the back of it.
That evening, I met the workshop leaders, two girls from the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, Olla, and Gosha. Their job was to organize our workshops and guide our thoughts in the right direction. It was a big surprise to me when it turned out that my team didn’t have any representative of Ukraine. And so our team consisted of three guys from Slovakia, Romania and Kazakhstan, a girl from Poland, as well as two workshop leaders and a representative of HERE Technologies from Greece. All of them were unique; someone had a thorough knowledge of programming, someone had research potential and experience, someone already worked full-time in HERE Technologies projects.
As the organizers stated, their goal was to bring together representatives of different countries, different interests, different ages, and different genders into one team.
I can say that it worked. Although we spent a lot of time on setting goals and tasks, each teammate put a lot of effort into this project. At the finale, we had several working ideas: to develop a universal analyzer for bicycle transport, to create a map that could show traffic congestion in each part of the city, to develop an application to identify pits and cracks on the roads.
Due to the lack of time and problems with software implementation, we chose the second option.
My task was to develop a working prototype. I made a desktop application for C# that worked using the threshold filter principle. As for other participants, their goals were to collect and prepare general information about our idea and Mapillary platform, develop a logo, make a presentation, create a business name and an overall outline. As a result, we had an application that was supposed to work in tandem with the Mapillary platform and identify the state of the roads.
Obviously, the program has some drawbacks and it clearly requires refinement, but nevertheless, our project was a great success and many people appreciated our efforts. In addition to our project, there were many other very interesting projects that have touched many industries of cartography and human life in general. For example, the team “Geek Culture in Cityspace” has developed a site with tags of places where you can spend time and have fun, such as cinemas, night clubs, pubs, amusement parks, etc. The “Smart Cities” team has developed a service for finding pits and displaying them on a public map, and the “Urban Mobility” team has developed the prototype of the app for public transport users.
Leisure and time after work
The organizers tried their best to integrate different countries for the participants to exchange their ideas and simply have fun. I should point out that a great role in this process was played by our mentors, the students of the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan. They arranged a wonderful city tour, showed us the places with the most delicious food and overall were like the “glue” of our group.
The organizers did their best for us not only to work but also to have a good rest. For example, we spent the whole day kayaking and right after that had a barbecue. At the end of every day, we had a “little celebration”; that could be sports, city walks or a farewell party.
Study visits
In addition, our leisure time was also informative, thus, for example, the teams visited a partner company, Yanoshik, which develops navigation products for cars. The company is one of the leaders in the Polish market in this field. In particular, members of the company told us how road signs coding and road restrictions for safe driving work. We also had a small master class of Open Street Map work. The structure of this company is really impressive.
We were given the opportunity to work with GPS equipment, and we delved into the data collection process. We attended HERE XYZ STUDIO and API trainings. After working with these applications, I decided that those are the best programs for gradual GIS entry.
My opinion is that these applications have the most user-friendly interface, it is very easy to download big data, and the official YouTube channels of HERE Technologies have free video lessons in many languages.
HERE Summer School 2019 Poznań gave me the opportunities to improve my skills and meet new and very interesting people, and it can also be useful in my future career.
