Background

Purpose of the OpenGeoHub Spatial Prediction Competition Game (the OpenGeoHub hackaton; former GEOSTAT hackatons) is to provide an opportunity to students to use all obtained knowledge during the course for solving a real-life problems. This typically implies producing predictions for a given data set (not previously published). It is the ultimate test of your coding and GEOgraphy-STATistics skills. The winners are announced on the last day of the Summer School and symbolic awards are given... and of course stay famous forever!

I came to know Roger around the year 2000, through emails he posted to ai-geostats, an email list started by Gregoire Dubois from JRC, which was a place to discuss analysis of spatial data — whether geostatistical, lattice or point pattern — involving both methodological and practical, software aspects. In 2003, Roger contacted me by direct email asking whether I'd be interested to join a pre-conference workshop held at DSC2003, the conference series that later spun off the UseR!