Uydu Yer Gözlem Uygulamaları (UYGU) Yaz Okulu 2024

Prof.Dr. Mikdat KADIOĞLU is a Meteorology and Disaster Management Professor. He received his Master's degree in Atmospheric Sciences in 1987 and his Doctorate in 1991 from the University of Missouri-Columbia in the United States. He has attended training programs in Disaster Management with FEMA in the United States, JICA in Japan, and Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. He has publications in the fields of Atmospheric Sciences and Disaster Management. He has served as a consultant for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Disaster Coordination Center, the Prime Ministry Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, the Turkish Red Crescent, and TÜBİTAK MAM Presidency. He is a Civil Defense and Red Crescent Volunteer. He has produced and hosted documentaries on television. He has worked as a columnist for Hürriyet and Milliyet newspapers. He is currently the Head of the Department of Meteorological Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Director of the ITU Climate Change Application and Research Center, and Director of the ITU Disaster Management Institute.

She received her bachelor's degree from the School of Geomatic Engineering. Since her passion and ambition has always been to study computer science, she applied to the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) department at ITU to do her master's degree and PhD. Her research areas have been formed based on the experiences she achieved while in the Department of CSE at ITU. In her research, she has been acutely interested in machine learning (ML), working on more advanced techniques, and developing alternative ML methods to solve multiple issues encountered in various application domains. The ML topics on which she has mostly worked are methods, explainable AI, classification, multivariate regression, feature selection, feature extraction, manifold learning, model selection, and optimization, including heuristic methods. She has also been dealing with remote sensing image analysis, including earthquake damage assessment from high-resolution satellite images, hyperspectral image classification along with dimensionality reduction, and SAR data analysis for paddy-rice crop monitoring. Additionally, she holds the position of co-chair at the IEEE GRSS Turkey Chapter and serves as an active member of the IEEE Image Analysis and Data Fusion (IADF) Technical Committee. More info: https://sites.google.com/view/gulsentaskin/bio

Prof. Dr. Taşkın Kavzoğlu is a senior researcher in remote sensing with over 25 years of experience in Earth observation and remote sensing. He earned his B.Sc. in Geodesy and Photogrammetry from Karadeniz Technical University (Türkiye), an M.Sc. in Geographical Information Systems, and a Ph.D. in Remote Sensing from the University of Nottingham (U.K.). Currently, he serves as a full-time professor at Gebze Technical University (Türkiye) and has been a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences since 2015. He has authored numerous papers aligned with his research interests, encompassing Earth observation, remote sensing of natural resources, deep learning, machine learning, analysis of environmental effects of natural hazards (e.g., landslides, forest fires and marine mucilage), change detection, mapping of forested lands and object-based image analysis. Additionally, he has led scientific projects on urban change detection, forest species monitoring using remote sensing technologies, and the establishment of smart urban information systems. He has received various awards, including recognition for his Ph.D. thesis, projects, presentations at conferences, and journal publications. Prof. Dr. Taşkın Kavzoğlu has achieved the success of being the only Geomatics Engineering faculty member in Türkiye in both the “Career-long impact” and “Annual impact” categories in the World’s Most Influential Scientists List (in the top 2 percentile), which has been published by Stanford University since 2020.

Saman Ghaffarian, a geospatial data scientist, is dedicated to leveraging cutting-edge technologies for disaster and risk management. Currently serving as an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) at University College London (UCL), he specializes in researching emerging technologies such as advanced machine learning, Explainable and Responsible AI, and digital twins, all focused on disaster risk management.

His research explores the integration of geospatial data, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and socio-economic data analysis to assess, mitigate, and manage disasters and risks. Particularly, his focus lies in disaster and agricultural damage, recovery, resilience, and vulnerability assessments. He uses big/geospatial data, advanced machine learning methods, agent-based modeling, explainable AI, and digital twins for his research, processing various remote sensing data types including multispectral satellite images, UAV/drone, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Hyperspectral, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and ground-based data sets.

Currently, as the lead applicant on the "Digital Twins for Early Warning Systems" project at UCL, Saman leads a cutting-edge initiative aimed at enhancing early warning systems and mitigating the impact of disasters using digital twin technology. He is also a co-investigator of Horizon Europe AGILE and recently UKRI-funded PCTWIN projects, focused on developing technological tools for disaster risk management and Tsunami early warnings.

I serve as an Assistant Professor of Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence at the National Technical University of Athens, in addition to holding a position as an Adjunct Researcher at the National Observatory of Athens. As the leader of the OrionLab research group, we like to play with big Earth Observation (EO) data and use machine learning research to have a positive impact on the society and the environment. My research interests encompass the development of foundational models in remote sensing, focusing on self-supervised techniques for multi-modal EO data. I am also deeply invested in advancing vision-language models for the analysis and interpretation of remote sensing data, as well as earth system deep learning for spatiotemporal forecasting. A significant part of my work is dedicated to AI4EO applications aimed at societal good, particularly in managing natural disasters and assessing the impacts of climate change. I currently coordinate four research projects: ThinkingEarth, MeDiTwin, DeepCube, and SeasFire, each designed to push the boundaries of our understanding and application of AI in addressing critical environmental challenges.

Mahmud H Haghighi is an early-career scientist in the field of Remote Sensing with a focus on applications of SAR and InSAR on geohazards and engineering infrastructure. After completing a Bachelor's degree in Surveying Engineering from Tabriz University, Iran, in 2009, Mahmud Haghighi pursued a Master's degree in Remote Sensing from Tehran University, Iran, and completed it in 2012 with a research focus on measuring creep movement using InSAR. Subsequently, he completed a PhD at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, in 2019, with a research focus on Local to Large-scale InSAR for geohazards. This was followed by a postdoctoral position at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and later at the Institute of Photogrammetry and Geoinformation, Leibniz University Hannover, where Dr. Haghighi has been since 2020. Dr. Haghighi's main research topics include geohazard monitoring and risk assessment, infrastructure deformation monitoring, and large-scale InSAR deformation mapping of land subsidence, landslides and other natural and anthropogenic hazards. He is also actively involved in teaching activities, offering courses in Remote Sensing and Radar Remote Sensing at both MSc and BSc levels. He has been recognized as an expert in the field, having been invited to deliver lectures at various prestigious institutions such as the SAR-EDU Summer School at the University of Jena and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, as well as being a guest lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland. Furthermore, as an author and co-author of more than 20 scientific publications and a scientific committee member for the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Dr. Haghighi continues to make significant contributions to the field of Radar Remote Sensing and its application for geohazard research.

Prof. Dr. Norman Kerle holds the chair of Remote Sensing and Disaster Risk Management at the faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands. His work has been combining the two domains for more than 25 years, including his PhD research in volcano remote sensing (2002) at the University of Cambridge (UK). His main research interest centres on post-disaster response and damage assessment with geodata, where the deployment of many novel satellite systems over the last 2 decades has led to highly diverse methodologies to assess the consequences of disasters. The proliferation of both experimental and commercial drones/UAV over the last 10 years has been even more remarkable, and has allowed emergency response, as well as damage and recovery assessment at a far more sophisticated level. Recent methodological advances very well illustrate a shift from more traditional image processing and photogrammetry approaches towards state-of-the-art computer vision and computer science methods, and increasingly different forms of machine learning and semantic scene analysis. In recent years the damage assessment work has been extended to include also post-disaster recovery assessment, coupled with macro-economic modelling, both linked to resilience, and includes the use of crowdsourced information/VGI. Another line of research is together with the humanitarian community on so-called early action, in particular impact-based forecasting and its improvement and validation. Much of the research is carried out through projects funded through the European Commission, and has led to more than 100 journal papers and book contributions. For more details see https://research.utwente.nl/en/persons/norman-kerle.

Tolga Görüm is a geomorphologist interested in elucidating the mass wasting processes in different tectonic and geomorphic environments, their role in sculpting the landscapes, and mountain range evolution as a limiting factor for topographic development. In this respect, he is working on linking long- and short-term variability of erosion rates and landslide episodes at regional and local scales. He is using modern tools such as LIDAR and UAV in addition to field-based observations and measurements, geospatial technologies, geomorphic mapping and morphometric analysis, and radiometric dating techniques (e.g., Cosmogenic, OSL, and 14 C) for erosion-process deciphering. In addition, considering that his secondary field of expertise is in landslide science, he seeks ways to apply soft computing techniques (e.g., Fuzzy Logic, Machine Learning algorithms) to improve the landslide susceptibility and hazard models for a safer environment.

Dr. Nusret Demir serves as an Associate Professor in the Remote Sensing division within the Space Science and Technologies Department at Akdeniz University, Antalya, and is the founder of ETEN R&D Ltd. He earned his Ph.D. in Geomatic Engineering from ETH Zurich. Dr. Demir leads the Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Commission at the Surveying Engineers Chamber of Turkey and is Co-chair of the Working Group WG 1/5 on Microwave and InSAR Technology for Earth Observation under the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). His research, which includes supervision of several projects and publication of numerous papers, focuses on wildfire, flood, and earthquake risks.