A 2024 paper led by Dr Chukwuma Okolie, Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Cities, has been awarded the Best Paper Award by the International Journal of Image and Data Fusion (IJIDF) for 2024-2025. The award is presented by the IJIDF every two years to recognise outstanding papers published in the journal. The winner is selected at the sole discretion of the Award Committee, comprising the Editor-in-Chief and members of the Editorial Board. The award recognises excellence in scientific research, ethical conduct, and best practice.
The paper, Assessment of Explainable Tree-Based Ensemble Algorithms for the Enhancement of Copernicus Digital Elevation Model in Agricultural Lands explores how machine learning can improve the quality of elevation data derived from satellites.
“Receiving the Best Paper Award from the IJIDF is a meaningful milestone in my research journey. It is an honour to be recognised by the academic community, and I see it as encouragement to continue pursuing research that addresses practical challenges. I am particularly grateful to my co-authors, whose collaboration made this work possible,” Okolie says.
Using agricultural landscapes in Cape Town as a case study, they compared ten machine-learning models to determine how effectively they could identify and correct errors in freely available digital elevation data. The study demonstrated that several models could substantially improve the quality of elevation data, while also showing that their performance varies across locations. Importantly, the research explored ways to make the models’ results more explainable, so that users can understand what influences their predictions.
“The underlying motivation for this research remains relevant to my current work at the ACC through the AMALI Data Programme,” Okolie says. AMALI supports African cities in strengthening their use of data and evidence in addressing urban development challenges linked to their leaders’ legacy goals. “Whether improving the quality of datasets or supporting city teams to use evidence in planning, the central concern is the same: data must be sufficiently reliable, meaningful and usable to inform decisions. For me, this award is both recognition of past collaborative research and motivation to continue bridging data science, urban development and evidence-informed decision-making,” Okolie says.
Download the award winning paper.