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UCL Department of Geography

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Marcos Moreu

Marcos studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Lleida, Spain (BSc, 2012). During his undergraduate studies, he collaborated with the NGO Engineering Without Borders in Spain and El Salvador. Between 2013 and 2015 he completed – online and part-time – a PgDip in GIS at Ulster University. After that, he worked for a UK-based geospatial company and for the UN Satellite Centre in Kenya on disaster management-related projects. Before joining the UCL’s Extreme Citizen Science Lab (ExCiteS) in Nov 2018 he completed his MSc Dissertation on Remote Sensing for deforestation monitoring and created the OpenChangeDetectionMap project. In 2024 Marcos completed his PhD “Land user-generated maps: A socio-technical approach to popularise land use mapping through messaging” working with farming, pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in rural Ethiopia, Nigeria, Namibia and Kenya.

Now Marcos’ research focuses on collective intelligence and crowdsourcing. Looking at human-human, human-land and human-computer (mobile) interactions, he explores how to connect users and producers of ground information, so ground data users can bridge the poverty gap by paying land users for bridging the ground data gap and for their crucial contribution to sustainability.

Marcos is currently collaborating with the UCL's Centre for Advanced Research Computing (UCL ARC) to evolve "Kapta: A (de)centralised crowdsourcing system to connect users and producers of ground information", the innovation that he co-designed, developed and implemented as part of his PhD research.

Marcos's research has been funded by the European Research Council, UK Research and Innovation, Formas, UCL Grand Challenges-Food Security Special Issue, UCL Innovation & Enterprise and UCL Grand Challenges-Responsible Innovation Award.