VSU, UHasselt in Belgium conclude 3rd workshop on citizen science research

Now on its third series, the VSU Department of Statistics in collaboration with the Data Science Institute of Universiteit Hasselt (UHasselt) in Belgium successfully ended the two-week International Training Program (ITP) workshop on co-creating environmental citizen science in the Philippines. 

This collaborative project targets to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to achieve environmental sustainability in the Philippines by including the local communities during the research process. 

The third workshop series focused on citizen science analysis at the intermediate level covering topics on statistical science communication and generalized linear models for two weeks.

Prof. dr. Thomas Neyens, the promoter of the ITP Project from UHasselt together with Prof. dr. Ziv Shkedy, shared their expertise and trained the researchers and faculty members from 22 participating universities in the country, along with participants from Vietnam and Indonesia, respectively.

VSU also hosted the first-ever ITP Workshop last May 2023 focusing on the basic concepts of inclusively co-creating citizen science, while ITP Workshop 2 on designing environmental citizen science studies was successfully conducted in Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology in Cagayan de Oro City in November 2023.

According to Dr. Norberto E. Milla, Jr., the Co-promoter of ITP at VSU and a faculty member of the Department of Statistics said that the main goal of ITP is applying citizen science in doing research. 

“This means that people in the local communities, say the Indigenous Peoples, are directly involved in the research process such as in the data collection. They will be trained [on] how to collect the appropriate data using appropriate tools and technology. The ITP helped the faculty researchers at VSU, particularly those whose research interests are in environmental conservation and related fields, gain knowledge about citizen science approaches at the same time they were trained on advanced statistical tools, such as Generalized Linear Models, to analyze data from their respective researches. Finally, the ITP also allows VSU researchers to connect and collaborate with researchers from other universities in the country and abroad.”

This project is funded by the Flemish Interuniversity Council – University Development Cooperation (VLIR-OUS). VLIR-OUS provided scholarship grants to 30 selected participants for the two-week workshop including their airfare, food, and accommodation.

Aside from the ITP workshop, another simultaneous lecture series was also conducted by Prof. dr. Olivier Thas with the third-year and fourth-year undergraduate statistics students.

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