Zoltán Siki

His interest in computer science dates back to his university years, to the time of the ODRA 1204 and R-32 computers. In his diploma thesis, defended in 1983, he dealt with automated mapping and terrain modeling. Between 1983 and 1986, he was a scientific fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the Budapest University of Technology (BME), supervised by Ákos Detrekői. The topic of his university doctoral dissertation, defended in 1996, is micro-level traffic simulation and GIS modeling of the environmental impact of vehicles.

Since 1986, he has been a member of the Department of General Geodesy, and later of the Department of General and Advanced Geodesy, at the Budapest University of Technology. He is the developer and lecturer of numerous IT, geoinformatics, and GIS subjects.

He is a founding member (charter member) of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo); his role is decisive in the domestic dissemination of open source geospatial information. He launched the annual Open Source Geospatial Information Workshops in 2013 and has been organizing them ever since. He is the head of the OSGeo Budapest lab, which is a member of Geo4All (or: GeoForAll), an international network of more than a hundred universities; the goal of the network is to coordinate research and education activities related to open source software. He participates in the development of several open source geospatial/geoinformatics projects (GitHub).

He has been involved in the work of the Geodesy and Geoinformatics Section of the Hungarian Chamber of Engineers (MMK) since 1997 - as a member of the presidency (1997-2009), vice-president (2009-2017), president (2017-). Between 2010-2019 he was a member of the Management Committee (IB) of the Hungarian Surveying, Cartography and Remote Sensing Society (MFTTT). Since 2012 he has been a member of the presidency of the gita Technical Geoinformatics Association. Active member of the international open source geoinformatics community.

Winner of the Márton Gyárfás plaque in 2014, founded by the MFTTT and the Surveying Department of the Transylvanian Hungarian Technical and Scientific Society (EMT).