Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury! When international renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Summary

Although information theory is primarily concerned with the transmission of information it can be also applied to the quantification of the intrinsic information that emerges from a given physical system. Over the past years, principles of information theory have been applied to many environmental and ecological studies. However, it still appears that the initial concept of entropy as identified by Shannon’s initial contribution cannot be directly applied to evolving geographical systems. The research introduced in this lecture suggests an extension of the concept of entropy to the spatial and temporal dimensions, by taking into account the distribution of entities in space and time. We propose a series of entropy measures that together form a set of complementary indices to evaluate the distribution of entities, events and categories in space and time. The whole approach is exemplified by several illustrative configurations and case studies.