IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015 - 5

and IGARSS 2020 to be at the Big Island, Hawaii. I want
to thank our Vice President for Meetings and Symposia,
David Kunkee, for his oversight and significant help in
making our conferences successful. We also had 13 technically and financially sponsored small symposia around
the world in 2015 which were facilitated by Irena Hajnsek
and Akira Hirose to whom my gratitude goes. In 2015, I
established the GRSS Conference Publications Committee, chaired by Leung Tsang, to monitor the quality of our
conference and specialty symposia papers.
Our society offers multiple venues for dissemination of knowledge through our publications. Over the
past few years I have witnessed steady improvements
of our journals' ranking and growth in the number of
published pages. In 2015 our publication page budgets
increased by 36% (+4150 pages) representing a significant increase while improving our impact factors. The
impact factor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and
Remote Sensing, Journal of Selected Topics in Applied
Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, and Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, have attained values
of 3.51, 3.02, and 2.09 respectively. We are all indebted
to our devoted Editors-in-Chief, Antonio Plaza (TGR A),
Jocelyn Chanussot (J-STARS), and Alejandro Frery
(GSRL) for the great job they doing with our journals.
Of course, the GRSS Magazine has been a great success
as well under the leadership of its Editor-in-Chief, Lorenzo Bruzzone. J-STARS has a new EIC, Prof. Jenny Du
who will take over from Jocelyn Chanussot at the start
of next year. We would like to thank Jocelyn for all of
his hard work in building J-STARS from a floundering
publication into a well respected journal. GRSL has also
reached a quasi-steady state which was a quantum leap
during the tenure of Alejandro Frery. Special thanks
goes to our VP of Publications, Bill Emery, for managing all of our publications and ensuring a high standard
of quality and integrity.
The technical activities of our society have been managed by John Kerekes. John has been instrumental in revitalizing and reorganizing of GRSS technical activities.
Currently GRSS technical activities is organized through
5 Technical Committees: 1) Frequency Allocations in
Remote Sensing (FARS), 2) Instrumentation and Future
Technologies (IFT), 3) Image Analysis and Data Fusion
(IADF), 4) Earth Science Informatics (ESI), and 5) International Spaceborne Imaging Spectroscopy (ISIS).
These committees have been very active in 2015 and I
try to highlight some of them here. The IADF Techical
Committee has been working on developing a Standardized Data Website and held the EarthVision Workshop
at IEEE CVPR Meeting. The International Spaceborne
Imaging Spectroscopy TC held the International CalVal Workshop for Spaceborne Hyperspectral Imaging
in Edinburgh, UK this Fall and are working to develop
a textbook on spaceborne hyperspectral calibration and
validation. The IFT Technical Committee organized two
december 2015

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

workshops and supported student travel to GNSS+R
Workshop in Potsdam, Germany and UAVSAR Workshop
in San Francisco, USA. The ESI Technical Committee actively participated in ISO/TC211 Meeting, Southampton,
UK and Open Geospatial Consortium Meeting, Boulder,
CO. The FARS Technical Committee had pivotal roles in
the Space Frequency Coordination Group meeting, which
occurred at Tsukuba, Japan and the NSF Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum meeting that occurred in Arlington, VA. The FARS TC has begun implementation of
an RFI Reporting webtool in conjunction with the VP of
Information Resources. Steve Reising, the IEEE GRSS VP
for Information Resources, has been working tirelessly to
enhance our society presence in digital media, enhance
our society webpage, and publicity. Thanks to the valuable efforts of Editor-in-Chief of the GRSS eNewsletter,
Fabio Pacifici, our members have easy access to important technical news and events related to IEEE GRSS and
its members.
I take this opportunity to thank Dr. John Kerekes for his
many years of service as the VP of the IEEE GRSS Technical
Activities. John is stepping down from this role at the end
of December 2015. I have appointed Dr. Irena Hajnsek as
the new VP of Technical Activities whose term will start in
January 1, 2016.
Our society members' support, promotion, and expansion have been steadily improving under the leadership of
Wooil Moon, the VP of GRSS Professional Activities. IEEE
GRSS recognizes and celebrates the achievements of its
members through a wide range of recognitions and awards.
The variety and number of these awards and recognitions
are more than what are offered by any other IEEE society.
IEEE GRSS offers 16 awards
including 4 Major Awards, 4
special awards, and 8 different
IEEE GRSS IS commIttEd
publications awards. We were
to ItS mEmbERShIp
just notified that the IEEE TAB
pRomotIon and
Awards Review Committee apREcEntly EStablIShEd
proved our request to establish
a pRoGRam to SuppoRt
a new award named the "InundERREpRESEntEd
dustry Leader Award" to enable
us to specifically recognize our
GRoupS aRound thE
industry members for their sigwoRld.
nificant achievements. I greatly
appreciate the efforts of our
Award Committees and want
to specifically thank their chairs: Werner Wiesbeck, Martti
Hallikainen, and Mahta Moghaddam. Another area where
we promote our members is through their elevation to Senior and Fellow level memberships. In 2015, 9 deserving
members of our society were evaluated to the rank of IEEE
Fellow and 32 were elevated to the rank of Senior member.
As mentioned previously, we are expanding our footprint around the world by establishing more GRSS Chapters. Currently GRSS has 55 chapters around the world of
which 11 were established in 2015 thanks to the efforts of
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2015