Message from Editor-in-Chief for Vol.17, No.4 August 2021 Issue

From Editor-in-Chief

Geoinformation technologies are being increasingly used in modeling the continuous transformation in the land use patterns of inland as well as coastal areas. These changes are normally the result of impacts of climate change, ocean current, disaster, or urbanization. This issue of International Journal of Geoinformatics is a very interesting collection of research papers. There is also one paper on the performance evaluation of GNSS receiver. There is a very useful research output presented by Maged and Van Genderen on Sea Surface Current Velocity Retrieval using TanDAM-X Satellite Data. This may be very useful in many future research or applications. Geographic Information System (GIS) is a powerful technique being frequently used in evaluating and planning healthcare facilities. This issue contains a paper on Evaluating the Accessibility of Healthcare Facility for Patients with Colon and Rectal Carcinoma in the State of Kelantan and Sabah in Malaysia. This makes this issue really a document to preserve as an excellent knowledge source for the natural resource management and also healthcare management. Several scientists have used the option of Open Access which gives them access to DOI. I am sure this will make their papers more visible and cited.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the World Economic Forum the companies still believe the health industry remains the most-likely beneficiary of AI over the next decade, due to the technology’s potential to improve patient outcomes. Google is moving fast in implementing AI for diagnostic for various diseases and provide advance notice to the doctors. This will dramatically reduce mortality by giving doctors more time to act. The initiative by Google will no doubt bring expert doctors closer to the populations which have no or scarcity of doctors. AI and machine learning has been already implemented in GIS and many applications for disease modeling and forecasting such as Malaria etc. Many GIS software are coming out with add-ons of Machine learning, deep learning and AI in GIS and remote sensing packages. Google Earth Engine is providing data and machine learning tools free to users for image classification. This whole development has created a new ecosystem of the research direction based on the notions of AI.

International Journal of Geoinformatics shall be bringing out a Special Issue on HealthGIS from selected and peer reviewed papers from 7^th International Conf. on HealthGIS. This issue contains the report on the conference for your information. We are planning to conduct the next International Conference on HealthGIS in 2022 in December 2022 and hope that the world will be out of Covid infections and can start normal life by then. Please mark your calendar.