Stefanos Georganos gave a lightning talk titled 'Mapping SDG 11.1.1 using Earth Observation and Machine Learning' at the SESAC Open Session 1 held on 27 March 2026. Stefanos gave an overview of different projects under the IDEAMAPS Network umbrella.
Thanks to Climate AI Nordics for featuring our project and my PhD research DEPRIMAP in the monthly newsletter. The featured project webpage provides an overview of the DEPRIMAP project and its planned implementation in three phases
Stefanos Georganos attended the launch event of SESAC (Swedish Competence Centre for Satellite-Enabled Social Science Analytics) on March 5, 2026, at Lund University, Sweden. Two posters were presented at the event.
At the 44th EARSeL Symposium in Prague, the DEPRIMAP team actively contributed to the 8th Workshop on Earth Observation for the Global South — a platform dedicated to inclusive and data-driven urban research. Sai Ganesh Veeravalli presented a study on mapping informal settlement change in Nairobi using Google’s 2.5D dataset, now published in the ISPRS Archives. The workshop featured rich interactive sessions, global research exchanges, and forward-looking discussions on slum classification and EO-based monitoring. This blogpost recaps key moments, insights, and DEPRIMAP’s path forward.
DEPRIMAP participated in the 2025 Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate Change, held in Gothenburg, Sweden. Stefanos Georganos presented on the role of AI and geospatial methods in addressing urban inequality under climate stress, showcasing work on thermal discomfort mapping, population estimation, and infrastructure access in Sub-Saharan African cities. The workshop fostered valuable dialogue across disciplines and opened new doors for Nordic collaborations on AI for urban resilience.
At JURSE 2025 in Tunisia, the DEPRIMAP team presented new research on scalable urban deprivation mapping using open geospatial datasets. The study, rooted in collaboration from the 2024 Switzerland workshop, showcased a composite deprivation score framework tested in Nairobi and validated across eight global cities. The presentation introduced extended cross-city comparisons and laid out future directions, including new indicators, refined thresholds, and open-source tools.
The DEPRIMAP team is set to present at two major international conferences in May and June 2025. At JURSE 2025 in Tunisia, Stefanos Georganos will showcase a paper born out of the collaborative Switzerland workshop, focusing on scalable open-data methods for mapping urban deprivation. In June, Sai Ganesh Veeravalli, Stefanos Georganos, and Jan Haas will represent DEPRIMAP at the EARSeL Global South workshop, presenting new insights into informal settlement transformation using Google’s 2.5D dataset and Street View validation. Read more about our upcoming contributions and what they mean for mapping urban change.
DEPRIMAP is a research funded by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council, application 2023-01210) involving KAU (Karlstad University, Sweden)
