Opening and Plenary Session

Location: Auditorium, Milano Congressi (MiCo) — South Wing, Level +3

[Video] Opening and Awards Session
08:45
Welcome to IGARSS 2015 Sebastiano B. Serpico and Vito Pascazio — General Co-Chairs
08:55
Welcome from IEEE Howard E. Michel, 2015 IEEE President
09:05
Welcome from GRSS Kamal Sarabandi, IEEE GRSS President
09:15
Major Awards and Recognitions Werner Wiesbeck, Master of Ceremony 2015 IEEE Fellow 2015 GRSS Education Award 2015 IEEE GRSS Outstanding Service Award 2015 IEEE GRSS Distinguished Achievement Award
09:55
Coffee Break
Plenary Session
10:25
[Video] Earth Observation Today — Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century Volker Liebig
10:45
[Video] A Space Renaissance Roberto Battiston
11:05
[Video] Help from Above: Satellite Observations and Environmental Threats Piers Sellers
11:25
[Video] Terapixel Scale Geospatial Data Mining for Risk Averse and Hungry Humans Dave Thau
[Video] Symposium Introduction
11:50
IGARSS 2015 Technical Program Lorenzo Bruzzone and Paolo Gamba — Technical Co-Chairs
12:05
Closing Remarks Sebastiano B. Serpico and Vito Pascazio — General Co-Chairs

Plenary Speakers

Volker Liebig

Director of Earth Observation Programmes, European Space Agency

Earth Observation Today - Meet The Challenges Of The 21st Century

Since October 2004 Volker Liebig is the Director of Earth Observation Programmes and Head of ESA’s center ESRIN in Frascati, close to Rome. Volker Liebig grew up and studied geophysics in Munich. This is also where he received his PhD. He began his professional career in polar research. After six years working in space industry, he joined the German Space Agency, DARA and 11 years later ESA. Volker Liebig is lecturing at the University of Stuttgart, from which he has received a honorary professorship.

Roberto Battiston

Italian Space Agency (ASI) President

A Space Renaissance

Roberto Battiston was born in Trento 1956. He is the chair of Experimental Physics at the Physics Department or the Trento University. Prof. Battiston received the Laurea honoris causa from the Universtiy of Bucharest. He has 30 year long international collaborations in the field of experimental physics and fundamental interactions: Strong interactions, Electroweak interaction physics, Search for antimatter and dark matter in Cosmic Rays. He is author of more than 420 papers published on international scientific journals. Prof. Battiston organized several workshops devoted to space science and to advanced space technologies (Trento 1999, Elba 2002, Washington 2003, Bejijng 2006, CERN 2012). He is the founder of the AMS experiment, the first fundamental physics experiment approved for the International Space Station, installed on the ISS in 2011. He is member of CEPR, the governmental committee advising the Minister of Research and University. Since 2014 he is the President of the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

Piers Sellers

Deputy Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate
Acting Director of the Earth Sciences Division
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center

Help from Above: Satellite Observations and Environmental Threats

Piers Sellers was born and educated in the United Kingdom and moved to the U.S. in 1982 to carry out climate research at NASA/GSFC. From 1982 to 1996, he worked on global climate problems, particularly those involving interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and was involved in constructing computer models of the global climate system, satellite data interpretation and conducting large-scale field experiments in the USA, Canada, Africa, and Brazil. He served as project scientist for the first large Earth Observing System platform, Terra, launched in 1998. He has published over 70 papers, 30 of them as first author. His H-index is 49. He joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1996 and flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2002, 2006, and 2010, carrying out six spacewalks and working on ISS assembly tasks. He returned to GSFC in June, 2011.

Dave Thau

Senior Developer Advocate
Google

Terapixel Scale Geospatial Data Mining for Risk Averse and Hungry Humans

Dr. Dave Thau is a senior developer advocate for Google, focusing on Earth Engine, Google’s geospatial data processing platform. He joined Google in 2010, bringing with him 20 years of industry experience developing Internet-based applications. Over the past fourteen years, Dr. Thau has worked with large image databases and geospatial systems, focusing on the fields of ecology, forestry, and biodiversity. He currently works with scientists and NGOs developing software and algorithms that run on Google’s highly parallelized cloud computing image processing framework. Dr. Thau holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Davis.