During the first week of June 2025, we will host a GroIMP summer school in Göttingen. This event will serve to give an introduction to the platform, to help participants getting started with modelling and with their own models, and to give a deeper insight into some specific features.

The summer school is open for those who would like to learn how to work with GroIMP – Growth-grammar related Interactive Modelling Platform – and to write models in the rule-based programming language XL. Particularly, we target M.Sc. and Ph.D. students in Applied Computer Science, Botany, Agriculture, Horticulture or Forest Science with focus on information pro­cessing and modelling, but also interested guests from other disciplines.

Date: June 2 - 5, 2025

The summer school will take place at the Department of Ecoinformatics, Biometrics and Forest Growth, University of Göttingen:

Büsgenweg 4,
37077 Göttingen
Germany

Göttingen is easily accessible by train, and for accommodation the university provides a list of options.

The workshop language will be English and no congress fee is required. To help us with the planning of the event, please register early. If you would like to present your current work orally or in a model session, please add a short summary to the registration.

To some extent it will be possible to attend the Summer School online. We will do our best to create a hybrid event. However, we cannot guarantee access to all presentations and discussions, and we will only be able to provide limited assistance to online participants. We therefore strongly encourage you to come to Göttingen to benefit from the direct interaction with the organizers and staff.

A registration is also required for online participation.

Ph.D. students will be able to earn credits for active participation. This requires the student to give an oral presentation. If you are interested, please indicate this on the registration form and include a short abstract.

During the Summer School, participants will have the opportunity to give oral presentations on their GroIMP projects. The presentation should last 15 to 20 minutes and will take place on June 5. We would like the presenters to also participate in the model session in order to give the audience a better impression of the work presented.

Similar to a software session, the models will be presented in parallel in an open room. The idea is not to present the perfect model, but to share your approach, exchange ideas and learn from each other.

The program will be updated.

Day 1-3 will consist of short lectures and interactive tutorials with exercises. On Day 4, participants will have the opportunity to showcase their research and present their models.

You can find a full time table here

If you have any questions, or would like to provide a contribution yourself, please reach out to us:

Please install GroIMP before the start of the summer school so we can start right away with the presentations. If you encounter any issues with the installation of the requirements please reach out to us so we can help you. We are available the whole week through E-mail, or we can set up a online meeting.

Please make sure you have version 2.2 of GroIMP installed. You can find instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux on https://wiki.grogra.de/doku.php?id=user-manual:ch01#requirements.

Please make sure that everything works by following the steps shown here: https://wiki.grogra.de/doku.php?id=user-manual:ch01#testing_groimp_for_the_first_time.

Note: This version requires Java 21. Make sure you have it installed.

Some features of GroIMP, most importantly the full spectral ray tracer (GPUFlux), require access to a Graphics Card and OpenCL. To test if GroIMP can access OpenCL, please go to the GroIMP main Menu on “Help/System Info.” Under Libraries OpenCL you can see if your library is loaded, in some cases, you have to scroll to the right to see the actual text.

If GroIMP can not find a native OpenCL library and your computer has a graphics card, please install the OpenCL version provided by your Graphics card maintainer.

If you do not have a graphics card or cannot install the drivers you can try to install POCL(https://portablecl.org/) which works like a “fake graphics card”, simulated on your CPU.