India’s national space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, or ISRO, regularly works towards developing space technology and its applications to serve national needs. ISRO has put India on the global space tech map and has the world’s largest constellation of remote-sensing satellites.
Back in 2007, ISRO, in association with the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, or IIRS, launched the IIRS-ISRO Outreach Programme. The programme consists of e-learning courses with a focus on strengthening the academia and user segments in the space technology domain and its applications. Twelve universities have participated in the programme.
In an attempt to further boost the interest of Indians in the space tech domain, ISRO has launched courses to build the skills of aspirants. Analytics India Magazine has curated a list of courses launched by ISRO in 2021.
Machine Learning to Deep Learning
This five-day course — Machine learning to Deep Learning: A journey for remote sensing classification, was organised by ISRO between July 5 and 9 as a part of its Outreach Programme. The course was designed for individuals and professionals engaged in remote sensing data processing in different applications involving extracting specific classes of interest. The course was divided into the following modules:
- Remote sensing and its sensors of various resolutions; radiometric and geometric corrections and basic understanding of image
- Basic classifier to ML
- Methods in ML: supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning
- Fuzzy-based ML with application in the temporal data processing
- Network-based learning algorithms: ANN to CNN/RNN
Government employees – both Central and State Government’s, professionals, researchers and individuals attached with NGOs could attend the course. The prerequisites for applying for this course was basic knowledge of remote sensing and Geographic Information System, or GIS.
Learners who have attended 70 per cent of the sessions via the e-class portal have received a course completion certificate.
Geo-processing using Python
Organised from January 18 to 29 this year, the Geo-processing using Python course focuses on geo-processing and visualisation on web platforms. The curriculum dives into:
- Overview of GIS and different geospatial data types
- Overview to Python programming using
- Introduction to Anaconda and Jupyter notebook
- Raster data processing, resampling and analysis
- Vector data processing and analysis
- Geospatial data visualisation on web
- Familiarisation with various open source geospatial data processing libraries, such as GDAL and Geopandas.
The course targeted final year students of graduate-level and postgraduate students, technical or scientific staff of the central and state governments, researchers and faculty of universities.
Web GIS Technology
The course was held between June 21 to July 02 this year and was open to all participants. The course included the following topics:
- Introduction to client-server systems, internet and Web GIS technology
- Introduction to HTML and Javascript
- Introduction of database management system- SQL Queries and data visualisation including PostgreSQL and PostGIS
- Introduction to publicly available webGIS platform for Geodata Processing
- OCG Web Services and data publishing using Geoserver
- Hands-on experiment on Geoserver – SLD, WMS, WFS, WCS and other Geo-web services
- Web Mapping APIs – OpenLayers
- Web Mapping APIs – Leaflet
- Development of Web GIS applications using Mashup architecture
- Web GIS applications for Governance
Learners with 60 per cent attendance were awarded course participation certificates from IIRS-ISRO.
Space technology and applications
IIRS and ISRO’s online certificate course on space technology and applications was held between May 31 and June 04. Targeting school teachers of standard 9 to 12 of all boards teaching science, mathematics and geography, the course focuses on topics in the field of remote sensing, GIS, GNSS and its applications. The course covered the following topics:
- Space technology and Indian Space Programme
- Satellite communication and navigation technology and its applications
- Satellite meteorology and weather applications
- Planetary science
- Astronomy and space science
- Satellite-based earth observations and remote sensing technology
- Remote sensing applications in governance
The course was free to take.
