International work

Academic consulting, laboratory establishment and applied research

• Supported the joint faculty of HIT and the National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek (NUU) in Tashkent — a faculty of 5 lecturers producing over 20 papers a year.
• HIT as "partner organisation" on NUU’s FAI grant no. AIF-2/4: establishing an interdisciplinary, multifunctional centre for computer modelling — 3D geomodelling.
• Courses and consulting on establishing a 3D modelling laboratory in geology, with the Faculty of Geology and Geographic Information Systems.
• Three working visits to Tashkent — 2021, 2022 and 2023 — providing continuous support to the programme and to the local faculty.
• Following the June–July 2022 visit, an assessment report went to the President of HIT recommending improvements to the international programme — expectation gaps, information flow and group composition.
• Planned the graduation ceremony for programme graduates at the close of the STEMM conference.
• Presented the Projects Center at the international food-security conference at Samarkand State University, including a project on overpopulation and urban change using Tashkent as the case study.
• Applied research proposal: monitoring micro-displacements at the Charvak Dam on the Chirchiq river using a LoRaWAN sensor network and remote sensing, including change models and real-time early warning — with a multidisciplinary team spanning geology, electronics, seismology, GIS, hydrology and geophysics.

Doctoral research and academic activity

• Doctoral research at KhAI — the National Aerospace University "Kharkiv Aviation Institute", supervised by Prof. Vyacheslav Kharchenko.
• Research seminar at KhAI (October 2024) on the organisation-oriented information systems quality model.
• Participation in international conferences on dependable systems and artificial intelligence — DESSERT and IDAACS.
• The work rests on four scientific results (NR1–NR4) and includes a series of English-language articles around a KPI framework for information systems governance.

A digital campus for Baku State University · agricultural remote sensing with Azercosmos

• Wrote a full concept for establishing a digital campus at Baku State University (BSU), following a round of meetings there between 24 November and 1 December 2019.
• An Information Center architecture — a single platform holding five interconnected databases, structured along the logical division of academic activity, research and teaching resources, with instant and complete access for the Rector’s office.
• Specified the applications: Student Card, Staff Card (distinguishing academic staff, administration, foreign lecturers and auxiliary positions), a Learning App, the LEE online learning environment, and library management across five permission levels.
• Information security folded into every development stage, including penetration testing and procedures against sensitive-data leakage.
• Technical recommendation: PostgreSQL and MongoDB, roughly 45–60 metric tables, a NoSQL approach sized for Big Data, and an API built alongside the initial UI.
• A staged rollout model: a pilot in one or two faculties with BSU staff deeply involved from the earliest phases — so that those same people train the rest of the institution during full deployment, cutting both implementation time and cost.
• Built a collaboration proposal with Azercosmos, the Azerbaijani space agency, for agricultural monitoring based on satellite image processing.
• Proposed monitoring scope: cotton field irrigation across three growth stages (planting, before flowering, after flowering), tobacco field irrigation, vegetation growth on rural land and yield estimation.
• Crop map development from satellite imagery processing, and land salinity estimation.
• Defining the deliverable: image decoding, spectral signature classification, an output layer and supporting desktop software for the user.
• Analysed the gap between a fully automated pipeline — requiring complex image processing combined with machine learning — and a semi-automated process, and what each means for the specification.
• Lectures and academic consulting at higher-education institutions, continuing the international work of the HIT Projects Center.

GIS workshop and mapping of the old Jewish cemetery

• Initiated and led a three-day GIS workshop during which the old Jewish cemetery — roughly 4,000 graves — was actually surveyed and mapped.
• The workshop was designed so that local pupils and students learn mapping methods by doing the work, not only in a classroom.
• Day one: GIS lectures — the components of mapping, working principles and applications; training on open-source software and setting up the working environment; fieldwork and real mapping; back to the lab to update the database.
• Day two: continued mapping and database updates, teams split into a competitive format, and an extension into 3D and ways of presenting geographic information.
• Day three: completing the survey and preparing the deliverables.
• All mapping was done from mobile phones using open-source software — no licensing costs.
• Deliverables: a grave database with coordinates and photographs, SHP layers, drone aerial imagery, and 26 printed map sheets alongside A0 and A3 cemetery plans.
• Alongside the project — an introductory GIS lecture: what a geographic information system is, the fusion of remote sensing, photogrammetry, surveying and geodesy, and applications in urban planning, health, environment and law enforcement.