ORGANIZERS and PRESENTERS
A NOTE FROM THE ORGANIZERS
The educational needs and interest of society in technological fields are rapidly changing. Basic higher education is commonly not sufficient to meet educational needs in the field of remote sensing. The SPatial LITeracy Remote Sensing (SPLITRS) Summer School is an international and interactive event between universities, research institutions and private firms that considers state-of-the-art remote sensing technology, sophisticated and comprehensive modeling approaches, data analysis, and sophisticated software capabilities – all of which is incorporated in the framework of building a well-designed strategy to protect natural resources and public well-being.
The process of globalization requires a specific role of teachers to adapt themselves for international opportunities, rearranging their skills, achievements, and previous experiences.
We try our best to create professionally healthy and relaxed atmosphere during the SPLITRS events, where all participants feel comfortable and equally treated regardless of their gender, orientation, religion or race.
Young people are our future and our future starts now.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Joaquim João Sousa, PhD
The University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD) / INESC TEC
Portugal
DIRECTOR
Anita Simic Milas, PhD
Bowling Green State University,
USA
PARTNERS
Mississippi State University, USA
-Dr. Nicolas Younan
Oikon Ltd. – Institute of Applied Ecology, Zagreb, Croatia
-Mr. Branimir Radun
Croatian Forest Research Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
-Dr. Sanja Peric
-Dr. Ivan Balenovic
GEO UNIT, Zadar, Croatia
-Dr. Luka Jurjevic
NubiGroup, Thessaloniki, Greece
-Dr. Konstantinos Ntouros
PRESENTERS
Joaquim Sousa
Dr. JOAQUIM SOUSA got his Ph.D. degree in Surveying Engineering from the University of Porto (and TUDelft), in 2010, writing his thesis on the “Potential of integrating PSInSAR Methodologies in the Detection of Surface Deformation”, and the Master degree in Surveying Engineering from the University of Porto, in 2001, working in the DEM Extraction using Radargrammetry. In 2010, he became Assistant Professor and joined the Department of Engineering of Sciences and Technology School of the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), as lecturer in Surveying Engineering (including, among other topics: Remote Sensing, GIS, Topography, Technical Drawing and Programming. He is author of some national publications on GIS and Topography.
Nowadays, his main interest focus on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for forest and agriculture applications, especially with regard to image processing algorithms, using RGB, NIR, multi and hyperspectral, Thermal and LiDAR sensors. In summary, precision agriculture and forestry, remote sensing, in-field sensing and applied machine learning are among his main interests.
He is the leader of UTAD’s UAV group, being involved in several research projects with total funds exceeding 7 M€.
Juan Manuel Jurado Rodriguez
Dr. JUAN MANUEL JURADO RODRIGUEZ is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Software Engineering of the University of Granada, Spain. Juan completed his M.S. degree in computer science in 2017 and he received an award for the best master’s thesis from the University of Jaén. In 2020, Juan completed his M.S degree in high-performance computing at the University of A Coruña and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Jaén. His research interests are in the modeling and processing of 3D models with a focus on multi-sensorial data fusion and observation of time-varying phenomena. Specifically, Juan is interested in developing efficient geometric representations of real-world environments, encoding remote-sensing data, and simulating their physical-based behavior.
José Alberto Gonçalves
Dr. JOSE ALBERTO GONCALVES holds a first degree in Surveying Engineering from the University of Porto (1988), MSc degree in Geographical Information Systems (1993) and PhD degree in Photogrammetry (2001), both from the University College London. He is currently a professor at the University of Porto, in Geospatial Engineering. His research interests are in photogrammetric mapping from UAV and aerial sensors and image based mobile mapping systems.
Luis Paulo Reis
Dr. LUIS PAULO REIS is an Associate Professor and Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Porto in Portugal. He is an IEEE senior member, was president of the Portuguese Society for Robotic and is now the president of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was the principal investigator of more than 20 research projects in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He won more than 60 scientific awards, including winning over 15 RoboCup international competitions. He supervised 22 PhD and 150MSc theses to completion. He was a plenary speaker at international conferences such as ICAART, ICINCO, LARS/SBR, WAF, IcSports, SYROCO, CLAWAR, WCQR and ECIAIR. He organized more than 60 international scientific events and belonged to the Program Committee of more than 250 scientific events. He is the author of more than 500 publications in international conferences and journals.
Mattia Callegari
Dr. MATTIA CALLEGARI received both the bachelor and master’s degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Trento, in 2010 and 2012 respectively. His Master thesis regarded snow-pack parameters retrieval in Alpine areas from Synthetic Aperture Radar and remote sensed optical data. In 2015 he received the Ph.D. degree on Alpine cryosphere dynamics monitoring using remote sensing techniques and ground-based data at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pavia. Since 2016, he is a researcher at EURAC-Institute for Earth Observation (Bolzano, Italy). His main fields of expertise are: alpine cryosphere monitoring with satellite data; image processing and classification; machine learning; SAR data processing including SAR polarimetry and interferometry. As a researcher at EURAC-Institute for Earth Observation he collaborated in many national and international projects.
Jochem Verrelst
Dr. JOCHEM VERRELST received the M.Sc. degree in tropical land use and in geo-information science both in 2005 and the Ph.D. in remote sensing in 2010 from Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands. His dissertation focused on the spaceborne spectrodirectional estimation of forest properties. In 2010, he moved to the Laboratory of Earth Observation (LEO), Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), University of Valencia, Spain. He has been involved in preparatory activities of ESA’s 8th Earth Explorer FLEX. His research interests include retrieval of vegetation properties using airborne and satellite optical (hyperspectral) data, canopy radiative transfer modelling and emulation, and hyperspectral data analysis. He is the founder of the ARTMO software package that brings together radiative transfer models and machine learning algorithms. In 2017 he received a H2020 ERC Starting Grant to work on the development of vegetation products based on synergy of FLEX and Sentinel-3 data (https://ipl.uv.es/sentiflex/). Since 2018, he is the vice-chair of the COST Action SENSECO that focuses on Optical synergies for spatiotemporal SENsing of Scalable ECOphysiological traits (https://www.senseco.eu/).
Luka Jurjevic
Dr. LUKA JURJEVIC received his doctoral degree from University of Zagreb in 2021. At the moment he is director of the company Geo Unit Ltd. in Zadar, Croatia. His current research interest includes remote sensing application in the forest area and application of UAVs in civil engineering. During the period when he was a research assistant at the Croatian Forest Research Institute he intensively worked on multiple Croatian Science Foundation projects, HORIZON2020 and other professional projects. During his academic career, he published ten scientific papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals as an author or co-author, and actively participated in a few international and national conferences.
Yunsheng Wang
Dr. YUNSHENG WANG received her PhD in nature science from the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is now a senior research scientist at the Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI). She is the PI of Finnish Academy Project “Monitoring and understanding forest ecosystem cycles using high temporal and spatial resolution terrestrial laser scanning time series (334060)” and PI of International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Scientific Initiatives 2019 project “International Benchmarking of terrestrial Image-based Point Clouds for Forestry”. Dr. Wang’s research works focus on remote sensing and computational technologies for forest environment modeling and investigation, which comprises three main themes: 1) 3D remote sensing technologies and computational data analysis; 2) Generation of virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) models of forest environments; 3) Quantification of important attributes of trees, and studying their interactions with the changing local environment in the context of forestry, ecology and climate. Dr. Wang is the associate Editor of the Forest Ecosystems journal, as well as the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing. Dr. Wang has published more than 40 ISI-listed scientific papers, including six ESI highly cited papers (1% top cited paper), with H-index 20 in Web of Science.
Xinlian Liang
Prof. Dr. XINLIAN LIANG received his Doctoral degree from Aalto University (Finland) in 2013 with honor. He is currently a Professor at the Wuhan University, and his current research interests include the innovative geospatial solutions in modeling forest ecosystem from point clouds as well as imagery technologies. He was a research manager at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI), where he has coordinated a few international benchmarking researches, e.g., EuroSDR International benchmarking on TLS methods, ISPRS International benchmarking of terrestrial image-based point clouds for forestry, International benchmarking of the individual tree detection methods for modeling 3-D canopy structure, etc. He is the Chair of the Working Group ‘Thematic Information Extraction’, the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), and the associate Editor of the Forest Ecosystems journal. He is an IEEE senior member. Prof.Liang has published more than 70 ISI-listed scientific papers, including five ESI highly cited papers (1% top cited paper), with H-index 27 in Web of Science.
Shibiao Bai
Dr. SHIBIAO BAI holds a bachelor’s degree in Geographic Science from the Lanzhou University (1999), MSc degree in Physical Geography (2002) and PhD degree in Cartography and Geography Information Systems (2005), both from the Nanjing Normal University. He is currently a professor at the Nanjing Normal University in Geography. His research interests are in landslide hazard and risk mapping; natural hazard early warning system; multi-hazard; spatial analysis. He led and participated in a number of national and international projects (e.g. The European Space Agency (ESA) and Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MOST) Dragon 3, Dragon 4 and Dragon 5; The France-China Égide Project Funding “Estimation of global change impacts on landslide hazards in a dynamic mountain environment”; The Sino Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation Program, “Intelligent analysis of environmental data and landslides risk mapping triggered by Wenchuan earthquake”; The Eurasia-Pacific Uninet Scholarship Program of Post-Doc Scholarships, “Landslide Hazard and Risk Management”. Currently, he is the principal investigator of sub project entitled “Research and Demonstration Application of Monitoring Technologies for the Geohazards in High Mountain Asia” of the National Key R&D Program of China “Research and Demonstration Application of Monitoring Technologies for the Snow, Glaciers and Geohazards in High Mountain Asia and Arctic” (the principal investigator of the National Key R&D Program of China is Prof. Jinghui Fan). He was a Guest Editor in Special Issues of Remote Sensing Water and Applied Sciences journals. He published more than 40 WoS indexed scientific papers, citations by about 2,000 documents.
Ivan Balenovic
Dr. IVAN BALENOVIC received his Doctoral degree from University of Zagreb in 2011. He is currently Assistant Director at the Croatian Forest Research Institute (CFRI) and Head of Division for Forest Management and Forestry Economics. His current research is focused on the application of various remote sensing technologies in forest inventory and forest management, with the special focus on photogrammetry and Lidar. He is a representative of CFRI and Vice-President in the Scientific Council for Remote Sensing in Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, as well as a member of the Croatian Academy of Forestry Sciences. He was participated in a number of national and international projects (e.g. H2020-EO2017 project “Operational sustainable forestry with satellite-based remote sensing – MySuistanableForest”). He was also PI of the national project “Retrieval of Information from Different Optical 3D Remote Sensing Sources for Use in Forest Inventory (3D-FORINVENT)” founded by Croatian Science Foundation. Currently, he is MC member of the COST action “Three-dimensional forest ecosystem monitoring and better understanding by terrestrial-based technologies (3DForEcoTech)” (2021-2025). Dr. Balenović is the is the Editor-in-Chief of the South-east European Forestry Journal, and Editorial Board Member of several scientific journals (Croatian Journal of Forest Engineering, New Forestry Mechanisation, Radovi/ Works of CFRI). He was a Guest Editor in Special Issues of Remote Sensing journal and International Journal of Remote Sensing. He published more than 40 WoS indexed scientific papers.
Sanja Peric
Dr. SANJA PERIC received her Doctoral degree from University of Zagreb in 2001. She is Director of the Croatian Forest Research Institute (CFRI) from 2019. She actively conducts research on issues relating to species and provenance selection for afforestation, reforestation and restoration purposes, while special focus gives to seed and nursery production, forest regeneration and forest restoration. Up to 2019 leads a long-lasting project on expert supervision of nursery production in the Republic of Croatia. She is a delegate at Chamber for agriculture and forestry at Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (promoted in November 2015); associate member of Academy of Forest Sciences (from 2005); full member of Academy of Forest Sciences (2021- up to now), associate member of Academy of Forestry Sciences (2005–2021), Croatian Forestry Society (1998-), Croatian Chamber of Engineers from Forestry and Wood Technology Sector (2006-), Croatian Ecological Society (1996), Croatian Biometric Society, Croatian Biotechnology Society, IUFRO Section for silviculture, EUFORGEN Section for Social Broadleaves, Croatian Arboriculture Society, President of Croatian Willows and Poplar Commission at Ministry for agriculture (2011-2015). She was a member of delegation of the Republic of Croatia on XII World Forestry Congress in Quebec, Canada. Participation in several courses in field education at Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology of the University of Zagreb. Leader of successfully evaluated infrastructural project for Croatian Forest Research Institute. Doc. dr. sc. Perić is a member of Sumarski list, Radovi, SEEFOR and Acta Silvestria Editorial Boards, does reviews (more than 50) for scientific journals RADOVI, SEEFOR, Sumarski list, Periodicum biologorum, CROJFI, etc. Publishes 42 scientific reviews and original research papers in WoS (9 in Q1/Q2, 15 in Q3/Q4), 18 scientific papers in A2 and 9 in A3 category. Co-authors 7 scientific book chapters and Croatian Technical Encyclopaedia. Possess 49 conference participations. She led and participated in a number of national and international projects (e.g. H2020-EU.3.5. project “Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest related biodiversity and ecosystem services-SUPERB”; H2020 „Incredible“ Innovation Networks of Cork, Resins and Edibles in the Mediterranean basin – INCREdible; H2020-EO-2017 “Operational sustainable forestry with satellite-based remote sensing – MySuistanableForest”; H2020 Towards and integrated Consistent European LULUCF Monitoring and Policy Pathway Assessment Framework – Pathfinder”). Currently, she is MC member of the COST actions CA19128: Pan-European Network for Climate Adaptive Forest Restoration and Reforestation (PEN-CAFoRR, 2020. – 2024.) and FP18135: Fire in the Earth System: Science & Society (FIRElinks, 2019. – 2023.).