Keynote Speakers (alphabetical order)
Feng GAO
United States Department of Agriculture, USA
Dr. Feng Gao is a Research Physical Scientist at the USDA-ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory in Beltsville, MD and a member of the Landsat Science Team. Dr. Gao’s research includes crop condition monitoring through fusing high temporal and high spatial remote sensing data, land cover and land use change detection using dense time-series data integrated from multiple sensors, surface reflectance anisotropy (bi-directional reflectance distribution function) modeling and correction, and surface biophysical parameters retrieval from remote sensing data.
Dr. Gao is internationally acclaimed for his development of multiple high-impact remote sensing algorithms and tools that have advanced research related to the scaling of hydrologic states and fluxes, and land-atmosphere processes, as well as operational monitoring and decision tools for agriculture. For his expertise and contributions, he has been selected to serve on two key NASA/USGS satellite science teams (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer-MODIS and Landsat) for five collective terms. Dr. Gao is internationally recognized as a leading expert on remote sensing data fusion, which facilitates daily mapping of land-surface conditions at fine spatial scales and is capable of monitoring individual agricultural fields by fusing information from multiple satellites. His novel techniques for integrating satellite remote sensing date from NASA, USGS, NOAA and the European Space Agency into useful and robust date products have been adopted by state-of-the-art land surface models and have had immediate and significant impact on improving agricultural modeling and monitoring.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Dr. Jiali Shang is a research scientist at the Ottawa Research and Development Centre (ORDC), Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) of the Canadian Federal Government. She is also adjunct professor of two Canadian Universities, York University and Nipissing University. She received her Bsc. in geography in 1984 from Beijing Normal University, China, M.A. in Geography in 1996 from University of Windsor, and Ph.D. in 2005 in Environmental Remote Sensing from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on the methodology development and application of Earth Observation (EO) and sensor technology to vegetation biophysical parameter retrieval, crop growth monitoring and modeling, precision farming, detection of field operation activities related to crop production using both optical and radar data, and assessment of soil nutrient runoff. She has authored/co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications and book chapters. In addition to research, Dr. Shang is also actively involved in student education, postdoc supervision, international scientific collaboration, and capacity building. She is currently serving as president of the Economics Community under International Society of Precision Agriculture. She is the Canadian representative serving in the Capacity Development Working Group (CD-WG) of International GEO under the United Nations facilitating GEO’s efforts on capacity development, promoting the principle of co-creation and providing support to the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of capacity development activities to fully use open EO data and tools. She is also a working member of the UN Open GIS Initiative..
B.Berk ÜSTÜNDAĞ
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
Burak Berk Ustundag (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in control systems and computer engineering from Istanbul Technical University (ITU). He is currently a Professor with the Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Computer and Informatics, Istanbul Technical University (ITU). He has served as a Science and Technology Advisor to Ministers and Governmental Institutions for more than 15 years. He has more than 100 scientific publications and patents. His research interests include data fusion, artificial intelligence, signal processing, global optimization, cognitive communication, and agricultural information systems. He is a member of the IEEE Communication Society and Computational Intelligence.
Piotr ZABOROWSKI
Open Geospatial Consortium
Piotr Zaborowski (male), Project Manager leading and managing OGC Innovation Program initiatives in the agriculture, EO, aviation. He holds an MSc in computer science from Warsaw University of Technology and an EMBA from WUTBS/CEU. Before joining OGC, Piotr was working in the commercial software development sector for Earth observations (like GEOSS Portal as PM/architect, International Charter Space and Major Disasters as BDM/Interim Manager, InCoNaDa as BDM, Disaster Charter Space and Major Disasters Operational System as BDM/PO), telecommunication (team lead/architect/PM) and financial markets(architect). He is fluent in the secure, distributed systems for mass market and large scale computations, but was also supporting RPA products development (CTO) and capacity building initiatives for EO operationalisation and organic growth for the European software sector.
more to be confirmed…