IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015 - 3

from the editor
by Lorenzo Bruzzone

his December issue of the IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Magazine concludes the third year
of this publication. During this year the content of the
magazine was further enriched in terms of both the
number of published articles and the variety of content. This was enabled by the work of the Editorial
Board and the high-quality article submissions by the
community. I would like to take this opportunity to
thank all of the people who have contributed to the
success of the IEEE GRSM.
In 2015 we began publishing thematic special
issues, with the September issue focused on the important theme of "Data Fusion in Remote Sensing". This
will be extended in 2016 when two additional special
issues will be published on key topics in remote sensing, "Big Data from Space" and "Machine Learning in
Remote Sensing and the Geosciences". I expect IEEE
GRSM to have many other special issues in the future
containing tutorial/review papers on specific thematic
areas. I encourage you to contact me if you are interested in proposing a special issue.
In the current issue we also begin publishing a
new column on Software and Data Sets. On the one
hand, the goal of this column is to publish articles that
describe relevant open source tools for data analysis of
interest of the community. On the other hand, it is to
publish articles on benchmark data sets for testing data
analysis algorithms. These contributions can be very
valuable for our community, in which the availability
of both advanced software tools and adequate benchmark data sets are of primary importance.
This issue includes two Feature articles. The first
article addresses the very important issue of interactive
access to the LP DAAC satellite data archives through

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2015.2508566
Date of publication: 3 February 2016

december 2015

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

a combination of open-source and custom middleware web services. The article describes services and
tools developed for a new paradigm of information
discovery for users. The second article addresses the
problem of urban aerial image matching by describing
a fast matching technique that can be used for image
retrieval, image mosaic and geometric measurements
in complex urban areas.
The new Software and Data Sets column presents an
article that describes KNIME, an open source modular computational environment that permits visual
assembly, interactive data analysis, and data processing. This open source tool is widely used in domains
other than geoscience and remote sensing but has very
interesting features to be exploited for data analysis in
our domain as well.
The Education column presents an article related to the IEEE
In thIs Issue we begIn
Geoscience and Remote Sensing
publIshIng a new
Society 2015 Summer School held
in Pavia, Italy, on July 29-30. The
column on software
school focused on the very releand data sets.
vant and challenging topic of data
fusion for risk management.
The Distinguished Lecturer Program column presents a short article describing the
program. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides GRSS Chapters with seminars by experts on topics of interest and importance to the geoscience and
remote sensing community. The article also includes
the current portfolio of GRSS Distinguished Speakers.
The Women in Geoscience and Remote Sensing column includes a short note encouraging applications
for grants to attend the 2016 IEEE WIE International

(continued on p. 6)
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015