The annual NCG symposium took place on 26 April. The approximately 100 participants listened to the Baarda lecture, the winner of the Tienstra Award, and took part in four workshop rounds.

After the opening of the plenary session by chair Arnold Bregt, the Baarda lecture “SpaceTime AI: Concepts, Methods and Applications” was presented by Tao Cheng (professor University College London - UCL). She proposed to represent all spatial information as graphs, which would facilitate certain analyses, and gave application examples from transport and crime analysis.

Ling Chang (University of Twente) won the Tienstra Research Prize and presented an overview of her research. She works in particular on Interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) methods to detect deformations. The practical relevance of her work (e.g. in gas extraction, railways and analysis of sinkholes) is great. According to the jury, the media attention this work received has made the importance of geodesy known (more) to a wide audience.

The plenary session was followed by four rounds of parallel sessions, in which a total of 48 presentations were shown, mostly by PhD students. About two-thirds of the presentations were related to remote sensing. All questions in the individual sessions were saved for the last 15 minutes of the sessions, which led to lively discussions with nice comparisons between the topics and also led to discussions among the speakers.

The NCG board looks back on a successful event that was finally able to take place as a physical event again.