IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015 - 34

A. RAtionAle And topic
In an ever-changing, dynamic world, high-resolution and
timely geospatial information with global access and cov-

erage becomes increasingly important for our society's
needs. Remote sensing can represent a valuable tool for
large-scale mapping of indicators related to vulnerability,
as well as for recovery and reconstruction processes and
their evolution over time. Although generally less accurate
than in-situ inspection and less rich in details about individual buildings, remote sensing can provide cost-effective information in terms of acquisition costs per square
km and allows capturing large geographical extents with
which in-situ inspections cannot compete.
To address the problem of data fusion from different sources, innovative frameworks and tools to integrate
space-based and in-situ sensing for dynamic vulnerability,
recovery monitoring and geospatial information handling
have been developed. Open-source software tools "integrated into a freely available and widely used GIS environment, such as QGIS" are meant to produce a multi-resolution, time-varying monitoring framework that applies to
the whole disaster cycle.
IGARSS 2015, the world's premier symposium on the
subject of remote sensing, took place in the same town as
the EXPO 2015 exhibition, whose topic is "Feeding the
planet: energy for life". The conference main theme highlights the role of remote sensing for assessing, monitoring,
and managing risks related to natural disasters.
Thus, within the conference, this year's Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Society School has offered its attendees an
exploration on data fusion capabilities and the opportunity
to evaluate results concerning risk indicator collection and
analysis in order to use data in a dynamic way for the purpose of mapping risk and its components. The School was
application-oriented and characterized by hands-on experience and examples.
The focus was to be on Masters and PhD students dealing with remote sensing and geosciences topics, but early
Post-Docs could in principle benefit too. The Summer
School is a contribution by the GRSS towards human capital development internationally, with a further objective
of attracting the next generation of practitioners - today's
students - to become aware of the GRSS and its benefits.
The students met international experts in the field and had
opportunities to develop professional connections.

Figure 2. The organizer Prof. Fabio Dell'Acqua welcoming attendees at the School opening session.

B. pRogRAmme
The programme was developed around a two-day scheme,
which had already been successfully applied in previous
editions of the School. The first day (Thursday, 23rd July)
was mainly devoted to basics and theory, while the second
day (Friday, 24th July) steered towards applications and
exercises. The first day included a welcome session illustrating the rationale (Figure 2) and the role of GRSS (Figure 3). Also included was a valued tutorial on radar remote
sensing, a tool which tends to be neglected by risk assessment practitioners operating on the side of exposure and
damage assessment. The second day included a practical
session where students had a chance to get their hands on

Figure 1. The School leaflet, front page.

The latter items were available and familiar to the organizing committee thanks to SENSUM [8] (framework to integrate Space-based and in-situ sENSing for dynamic vUlnerability and recovery Monitoring), an EU FP (Framework
Programme) 7 project within which our research group
developed a set of open-source tools for risk-related information extraction from remotely sensed data. Such tools
are currently available on GitHub [9] and as official QGIS
plugins [10].

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december 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015