Dr Xiaodong Li

During his time in the UK, Dr Li will support Professor Giles Foody and Dr Doreen Boyd at the University of Nottingham on research related to a project titled Remote Sensing to Inform Sustainable Development. The brick-making industry in India is a vast employer, providing work for an estimated 10-23 million people. Unfortunately, many workers are slave labourers and one barrier to ending slavery is having reliable and timely, spatially explicit and scalable data on slavery activity. This work requires mapped information on features associated with slavery that can be identified in remote sensing images. Dr Li’s seeks to use a set of remote sensing imagery to map brick kilns, which are strongly associated with slavery, across the ‘Brick Belt’ of India.