IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015 - 33

education
Fabio Dell'Acqua,
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell'Informazione,
University of Pavia, Italy
Senior Member, IEEE

The GRSS Summer School Pavia 2015

Abstract-The 2015 edition of the IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Society Summer School (GR4S) took
place in Pavia, Italy, the week before IGARSS 2015
(26th - 31st July) in Milan, Italy. This paper reports on
the School and its outcome.
I. INTRODUCTION
015 (i.e. fourth) edition of the IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Society Summer School (GR4S)
was successfully held on 23rd - 24th July 2015 in Pavia
(Italy). This event, promoted by the IEEE Geoscience
and Remote Sensing Society (IEEE GRSS), was organized by the Remote Sensing Group at the University
of Pavia [1] and the Aerospace Section at the European
Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering (EUCENTRE) [2] the week before the IEEE
International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium 2015 (IGARSS15) in nearby Milan, Italy. It took
place at the Department of Electrical, Computer, and
Biomedical Engineering [3], conveniently located near
university dorms that accommodated some of the attendees at a reasonable price. The 42 students came
from the four corners of the world (China, Thailand,
South Africa, USA, Europe) attended the lectures presented by 12 teachers, including renowned experts in
remote sensing. Besides the GRSS, the 2015 Summer
School was supported and advertised by the following
partners: the above-mentioned Department at the University of Pavia, the EUCENTRE through FP7 project
RASOR [4] "Rapid Analysis and Spatialization of Risk",
Ticinum Aerospace [5], a spin-off of the University of
Pavia active in remote sensing, the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) [6]. The
topic of the School was "Data Fusion for Risk Mapping",
which is currently a hot one. This GR4S continues a tra-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2015.2503841
Date of publication: 3 February 2016

december 2015

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

dition of being placed before the annual IGARSS, since
2009. A version of the GR4S was also presented at the
2014 AARSE Conference in Johannesburg.
II. THE 2015 GR4S
Although branded under the GR4S banner this year,
the "Pavia 2015 International Summer School on Data
Fusion for Risk Mapping" is the fifth in a series of International Summer Schools on Data Fusion held in Pavia,
Italy. The series started in 2011 with a "Data Fusion and
High Performance Computing" school, triggered by a
University call for funding of Summer Schools. Our
proposal ranked first among tens of proposals and
obtained the funding we needed to put into practice an
idea which had been lingering around for a while. The
success of the first school was replicated with a second
in 2012 on "Data Fusion and Target Detection", a third
one in 2013 on "Data Fusion of Synthetic Aperture
Radar Data", and a fourth one in 2014 on "Data Fusion
of Risk-related Remotely Sensed and Geospatial Data",
all of which were very successful and appreciated.
It thus appeared sensible to take advantage of the
local experience [7] to prepare the 2015 GR4S, prior to
the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Symposium 2015, or IGARSS 2015 "Remote Sensing:
Understanding the Earth for a Safer World", planned
for July 26-31 in Milan, Italy. Hence the merging of the
"Pavia Data Fusion" with the GR4S series for year 2015.
(see leaflet in Figure 1).
As more extensively motivated in the next subsection, the 2015 GR4S was conceived to deliver introductory knowledge on:
◗ exploitation of remotely sensed data from different
sources for purposes of mapping risk and its components, i.e. hazard, vulnerability, exposure, in a geospatial environment
◗ open-source tools and environments for geospatial
information handling
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