Partners

The consortium partners present a good mix of industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia to ensure the worldwide commercialisation of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept.

IHE Delft is an academic institution carrying out education, research and capacity building projects in the fields of water engineering, water management, environment, sanitation and governance. IHE Delft confers fully accredited Masters of Science degrees and supervises PhDs. It is the largest international postgraduate water education and research facility in the world. Since 1957, the Institute has provided postgraduate education to more than 15,000 water professionals from over 160 countries. IHE Delft is involved in numerous research and capacity development projects throughout the world. The Institute is based in the Netherlands.

Uta Wehn

Project Director, WP1 lead (Social Dimensions)

Hans van der Kwast

Kenya Demo Case lead

Altran group is global leader in innovation and high‐tech engineering consulting that accompanies its clients in the creation and development of new products and services. As an international group, Altran operates in over twenty countries throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. Altran has been providing services for around thirty years to key players in the Aerospace, Automotive, Energy, Railway, Finance, Healthcare and Telecoms sectors. Covering every stage of project development from strategic planning through to manufacturing, Altran group’s offers capitalise on the international technological know‐how in four key areas: Lifecycle Experience, Mechanical Engineering, Intelligent Systems and Information Systems. In Spain, Altran Innovación (hereafter Altran) extends Altran group’s principles to the Spanish context, with more than 2,500 innovation makers. Innovation is the core component of Altran’s strategy.

Alberto Masa

WP2 lead (Enabling technologies)

Starlab Barcelona S.L. is a private Research and Development company established in 2004. StarLab provides R&D solutions and services to institutional and private customers aimed at bridging the gap between research and society. StarLab has positioned itself as Value Added Company (VAC) in the provision of space and neuroscience services. StarLab has key expertise in the following aspects: managerial tasks, technical tasks, data sources integration, computational intelligence and machine learning, service customization, hardware/software development, and business modelling and market uptake.

Camille Pelloquin

Spanish Demo Case lead

Laura Moreno

WP3 Lead (Business Development)

The Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) is a public research institution located near Barcelona. CREAF’s main objective is to generate knowledge and create new methodological tools in the fields of environmental sciences and ecology. The research carried out by CREAF can be grouped into 4 main areas: Biodiversity, Functional Ecology and Global Change, Forest Ecology and Wildfires, and Environmental and Territorial Analysis and GIS. In the last area, the Grumets group is conducting research in big data, web mapping, remote sensing time series, and geospatial standards and is maintaining the RS & GIS MiraMon software. Learn more about CREAF's role in the project!

Joan Masó Pau

WP4 lead (Dissemination & communication)

HydroLogic Research (HR) is a hydroinformatics SME specialised in providing innovative water management solutions and services to the Dutch and international markets. HRs activities are focused on urban and rural water management, water safety, fluvial and pluvial flood simulation, forecasting, warning, real-time control and asset management of water infrastructure. Its applications and services use advances in hydroinformatics such as simulation models, data modelling, remote sensing, GIS-based modelling, risk and uncertainty analysis, artificial intelligence, decision-support systems, web services and mobile information and communication technologies. Learn more about HydroLogic's role in the project!

Rianne Giesen

Dutch Demo Case lead

The Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) of Stockholm University is located in Stockholm, right in the middle of one of the world’s leading ICT clusters - Kista Science City. Its academic activities are focused on developing and adapting the use of IT to the needs of people, organizations and society. The Department has four main focus areas: Design for Learning, e-Government, ICT for Development and Arts in Technology in Society. In 2011, DSV founded the eGovlab, which comprises of interface designers, engineers, anthropologists, eParticipation practitioners, artists, all engaged in projects ranging from decision support systems, argument visualisation, geospatial information systems, semantic text analysis, and mobile inclusiveness to change management & building the future of governance.

Somya Joshi

Swedish Demo Case lead

Tessy Cerratto Pargman

Swedish Demo Case deputy lead

VITO is a leading European research and technology organisation in the areas of clean tech and sustainable development, elaborating solutions for the large societal challenges of today. VITO focuses on five different research programmes: sustainable chemistry, energy, health, materials management and land use. One of its core competences is multi-disciplinary research collaboration, by combining technological, environmental and economic insights. VITO’s environmental modelling team’s expertise includes a variety of topics including urban climate, air quality, land use, water, soil, ecosystem services and environmental economics. VITO has a strong track record in delivering products and services to the Flemish Regional Government, the European Commission and to industry. VITO’s headquarters are located in Belgium and the company has a subsidiary in China.

Stijn Vranckx

Belgian Demo Case lead

WWF ZCO (Zambia Country Office) provides financial and technical support to conservation work in Zambia. Concretely, this means education and community conservation, policy development, review and implementation, trans-frontier conservation and civil society capacity building. WWF ZCOs activities also involves policy influence through engagement with strategic partners, analytical work through long terms and short term research as well as piloting innovative approaches to conservation. Recently, WWF ZCO has been working on capacity development for mainstreaming climate change adaptation and engagement with the extractives industry to promote more responsible exploitation of the environment. Having established its presence in 1962, WWF ZCO is the oldest international conservation organisation in Zambia.

Mwape Sichilongo

Zambia Demo Case lead

Akvo is a non-profit foundation that builds open source internet and mobile software to support international development partnership networks and to make cooperation and aid activity more effective and transparent. Its core business is to provide tools for data gathering using mobile applications. Akvo provides its software as a service, backed by a global partner-support and training team. It is headquartered in the Netherlands and has staff in 13 countries. Since its start in 2007, Akvo has extended its focus from water and sanitation to embrace health, education, agriculture, conservation and economic development. Hundreds of organisations are using Akvo tools and services, such as Akvo FLOW, Akvo Caddisfly and Akvo RSR.

Harro Riedstra

Earthwatch is an international environmental charity. Earthwatch brings individuals from all walks of life together with world-class scientists to work for the good of the planet. The Earthwatch community continues to grow rapidly, with participation from members of the general public they call "citizen scientists," to corporate employees, to educators and students. Learn more about Earthwatch's role in the project!

Steven Loiselle

Gavagai AB is a language technology company formed in 2008 as a spin-off from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). Extreme scalability, automation/learning, and language agnosticism are key features of their technology. Gavagai uses its semantic space model to develop and market text analysis technology for processing text streams into an automated, scalable and efficient knowledge representation, with a minimal training effort and no need of pre-categorised training data. Gavagai uses its text analysis tools both as a base technology for semantic analysis of large text streams and as a component in several services available for media monitoring, topical exploration of large text collections, and as a semantic backend for application in other products and services. Its customers include commercial and public organisations.

Jussi Karlgren

Presently, African hydro-meteorological data is virtually non-existent, and crop failures and disease outbreaks are frequent. TAHMO aims to address this problem by installing 20,000 in situ stations across the African continent. These stations are specifically designed to provide rainfall, temperature, and other critical data with robust redundant sensors with a real-time cell phone uplink. The data will be combined with models and satellite observations to obtain a very complete understanding of the distribution of water and energy stocks and fluxes. Stations will be located primarily at schools and universities, with TAHMO providing science curriculum materials. TAHMO will make high-quality data available to governments and scientists via the internet. The organisation consists of various (field) coordinators, researchers and supporting staff. Learn more about TAHMO's role in the project!

Frank Annor

Tygron is a software company founded in 2005 as a spinoff of the Delft University of Technology. Tygron’s core product is the Tygron Engine; an online 3D project software that offers a realistic, data driven 3D environment in which urban planners, architects, engineers and other stakeholders are able to experiment different scenarios, plan and negotiate better solutions for city designs and development projects. By providing such a visual, transparent and interactive platform to experiment with data, the Tygron Engine reduces time and costs in urban projects. The Tygron Engine make use of existing open source data but also allows its users to connect their own data and calculation models. Currently, over 1400 projects are active in the Tygron Engine.

Hansje Hooghiemstra

Upande Limited is a social enterprise from Kenya providing internet, web mapping and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) services to a variety of clients. The Upande Lim team consists of a group of experts in GIS, Internet mapping, environmental and social academics, software developers and business practitioners, and has got extensive expertise in remote sensing, Spatial Data Infrastucture, Open Data, SMS and USSD interface development, GIS, application development, and more. Upande Lim has an extensive record in Water Sanitation Hygiene (WASH) related data collection, data analysis, data dissemination and tool development. Upande Lim has a global clientele, including the World Bank, UN-Habitat, UNESCO-IHE, WWF ZCO, SNV, Ministry of Water of Kenya and the African Union.

Mark de Blois