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 (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. Our philosophy of teaching is based on a belief that students need to be equal partners in the learning process. 

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.

ORGANIZERS

Dr. Anita Simic Milas
Bowling Green State University, USA

Dr. Nicolas Younan
Mississippi State University, USA

Dr. Ivan Balenovic
Croatian Forest Research Institute, Croatia

Dr. Konstantinos Ntouros
NubiGroup, Greece

Dr. Petra Simova
Czech University of Life Sciences, Czech Republic

Dr. Vitezslav Moudry
Czech University of Life Sciences, Czech Republic

Dr. Marinko Oluic
University of Zagreb, Croatia

Dr. Marijan Herak
University of Zagreb, Croatia

PRESENTERS

Dr. JEAN-PHILIPPE GASTELLU-ETCHEGORRY

Dr. JEAN-PHILIPPE GASTELLU-ETCHEGORRY received an Engineer degree (ENSEEIHT) in 1978, in the field of physics and electricity. He obtained an aggregation degree (higher competition degree in education, in France) in the field of physics (Paris VI University) in 1981. He got a PhD degree in solar physics in 1983 at Paul Sabatier University. After being posted a few years in the Remote Sensing Center of Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia) and in Bangkok (Thailand), he obtained a PhD degree in remote sensing and digital image processing, in 1989 (Paul Sabatier University: PSU). Then, in 1990, he became a permanent staff of PSU. He conducted his research in the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, where he acted as a leader of the Remote Sensing group since 1992. In 1995, he joined the CESBIO (http://www.cesbio.ups-tlse.fr/index_us.htm), where he was the leader of the modeling team for 15 years. In 1997, he became full professor at PSU. Since 2002, he heads a Remote Sensing Society of 3000 members, in collaboration with AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie:http://www.reseautd.auf.org/). Since 2007, he is deputy director of CESBIO and President of the Scientific Council of IUT (a major faculty of PSU). His research work is focused on radiative transfer modeling with agriculture, forestry and urban applications. Since, 1992, he heads a team that develops the DART model (http://www.cesbio.ups-tlse.fr/dart/) that simulates the radiative budget and also satellite, airborne and in-situ spectroradiometer and LIDAR acquisitions of natural and urban landscapes. DART was patented in 2003. It is now being extended to model fluorescence and polarization.

Dr. HARM GREIDANUS

Dr. HARM GREIDANUS received a PhD degree in astrophysics from Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1989. The PhD topic was observations of supernova remnants at radio, infrared and optical wavelengths. Following that, he was a researcher in remote sensing and maritime surveillance, first with the Netherlands Organisation of Applied Scientific Research (TNO), and since 2003 with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, in Ispra, Italy. Specific research topics include: radar observation, Synthetic Aperture Radar processing, maritime radar image analysis, space-based surveillance, ship detection, and maritime data fusion. Application areas have included oceanography, fisheries control, maritime border security and counter-piracy. He is author of over 100 publications. Presently he works on knowledge management for security research.

Dr. MARTIN ISENBURG

Dr. MARTIN ISENBURG received his MSc in 1999 from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and his PhD in 2004 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA – both in Computer Science. Currently, he is an independent scientist, lecturer, and research consultant. Dr. Isenburg has created a popular suite of LiDAR processing software modules called LAStools that is the flagship product of rapidlasso GmbH, the company he founded in 2012. The LAStools software suite has deep market penetration and is heavily used in industry, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions. These highly efficient LiDAR processing tools are known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithms with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points. See http://rapidlasso.com for more information.

Dr. SELIM AKSOY

Dr. SELIM AKSOY received the B.S. degree from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 1996, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. During 2001-2003, he was a Research Scientist at Insightful Corporation in Seattle, Washington. He joined the Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara in 2004 where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include computer vision, statistical and structural pattern recognition, and machine learning with applications to remote sensing, medical imaging, and multimedia data analysis. He served as a Guest Editor for the special issues on Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Pattern Recognition Letters, and IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing in 2007, 2009, and 2012, respectively. He served as the Vice Chair of the IAPR Technical Committee 7 on Remote Sensing during 2004-2006, and as the Chair of the same committee during 2006-2010. He also served as an Associate Editor of Pattern Recognition Letters during 2009-2013.

Dr. CLAUDIA NOTARNICOLA

Dr. CLAUDIA NOTARNICOLA received the Degree in Physics, summa cum laude, and the PhD in Physics from the University of Bari (Italy) in 1995 and 2002 respectively. She is presently the vice-head of the EURAC-Institute of Applied Remote Sensing (Bolzano, Italy). Within the same institute she is leader of a group dealing with remote sensing applications in SAR and optical domain for soil and vegetation monitoring as well as integration of remotely sensed observations with models and ground measurements. Her main research interest includes biophysical parameters (soil moisture, vegetation, snow) retrieval by using optical images and SAR images, optical and SAR data processing, data fusion and electromagnetic models. She conducts research on these topics within the frameworks of several national and international projects. Among the others, she is involved in the Cassini-Huygens Project for the application of inversion procedure to the estimation of Titan surface parameters. She is a referee for IEEE and other international journals and since 2006, she serves as Conference Chairs for SPIE International Conference on “SAR Image Analysis, Modeling and Techniques”.

Dr. KONSTANTINOS TOPOUZELIS

Dr. KONSTANTINOS TOPOUZELIS holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies (University of the Aegean, Department of Environment), a Master’s degree in Remote Sensing (University of Dundee, Department of Applied Physics & Mechanical Engineering) and a Ph.D. in pollution monitoring from space (National Technical University of Athens, School of Rural and Surveying Engineering). Currently he is an assistant professor in the Department of Marine Sciences, University of the Aegean and he is leading the Marine Remote Sensing Group. http://mrsg.aegean.gr/

His main research interest is on the analysis of remote sensing datasets, including satellite and aerial images, for marine and coastal applications. His expertise includes automatic detection of oceanographic phenomena, Object Based Image Analysis, image processing algorithms and coastal mapping.

He is an author of several refereed papers in international scientific journals, member of editorial board of Mediterranean Marine Science Journal, referee in several scientific journals and principal investigator in international research projects. Prior to his academic career he worked for the European Commission Joint Research Centre, ISPRA, Italy and in Greek private sector.

GDi – Authorized representative of Harris

GDi is an innovative and award winning Central European provider of applied technology solutions, with over 25 years of successful growth and over 1,000 customers.

We provide proven industry focused business process software and data solutions that operate on globally leading technology platforms. Our solutions are complemented by a full range of related professional services, training and on-going long-term support, maintenance, managed operation and system change management. GDi is particularly well known for leadership in the field of Operations Support Systems (OSS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), Cloud Computing and Geoinformation Systems (GIS) for both the commercial and public market segments.

GDi was founded in 1989 and it has been growing continually to become one of the largest Central European focused companies in its field.

We are focused on solutions for management of resources, assets and operations in telecommunications, energy, government, agriculture and food, natural resources, environment, security and safety, and commercial industries.

Dr. RIBANA ROSCHER

Dr. RIBANA ROSCHER received her Diploma and PhD in Geodesy from the University of Bonn, Germany in 2008 and 2012, respectively. During 2012 and 2015 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Julius Kühn-Insitut (Institute for Grapevine Breeding) in Siebeldingen, Humboldt Innovation in Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015 she was a Visiting Researcher at The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, Canada. Since 2015 she is a Junior Professor for Remote Sensing at the University of Bonn. In her research, she aims at the development of pattern recognition methods, which are particularly designed for the analysis of large scale remote sensing data. She specifically focusses on efficient classification methods, techniques for sophisticated feature learning and the integration of prior knowledge such as spatial and temporal information. A central idea in her research is to develop methods which ensure a high discrimination power and at the same time model the underlying structure of the data, since such methods are a prerequisite for the automatic analysis of Earth observation data.