IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019 - 6

In addition, an important part of this strategy to build
the GRSS as a "community of communities" is the active
role of the Society in promoting regional and topical conferences. Since we now have a
memorandum of understanding with the International SoAS YOU SHOULD ALREADY
ciety of Digital Earth (ISDE),
BE AWARE, IGARSS 2020
we attended the 20th anniverWILL EXPERIMENT WITH
sary ISDE conference in FlorA NEW AND MORE AGILE
ence, Italy. The GRSS is continuing to increase its activity
FORMAT FOR THE ORAL
and visibility in the geospatial
SESSIONS, MEANT TO
information world. Similarly,
INCREASE TIME FOR
thanks to our partnerships
DISCUSSION AND
with the Asian Association
FOSTER INTERACTION.
on Remote Sensing and the
Group on Earth Observation,
we attended the 40th Asian
Conference on Remote Sensing, and we announced a Grand
Challenge for the Asia-Pacific Region devoted to supporting
GRSS Chapters to work toward the assessment of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through remote sensing. The call will be out soon; stay tuned!
Finally, although we still have vividly in mind fantastic
images from IGARSS 2019 in Yokohama, Japan (please read
the report on the conference and the publication awards
ceremony in this issue), the next conference team has already started its activities, and the technical and social
programs are taking shape for IGARSS 2020 in Waikoloa
on the Big Island of Hawai'i. The calls for invited sessions,
tutorials, and paper submissions opened on 11 November,
with a deadline of 15 January 2020. As you should already
be aware, IGARSS 2020 will experiment with a new and

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6

We want
to hear
from you!

more agile format for the oral sessions, meant to increase
time for discussion and foster interaction. Specifically, the
time for an oral presentation will be reduced to 5 min to
allow the presenters to summarize the most important and
interesting points of their work. Additional details as well
as longer explanations of the intermediate steps and procedures can be provided through a poster presentation in the
same room. To this end, 45 min are scheduled at the end of
each set of oral presentations to further discuss the short
talks presented. In cases where oral sessions for the same
topic cover more than one time block, only an introductory talk will be presented at the beginning of the first time
block, and the additional time during the second block
will be allocated to four more 5-min talks.
I am aware that this is a substantial change that forces
us all to alter the way we are used to presenting our work.
However, being clear and to the point as well as being able
to engage in fruitful discussions with other researchers is
definitely among the best qualities in scientific presenters,
and we hope this is an opportunity for young (and not so
young) researchers to exercise their abilities and improve.
Finally, 2020 is nigh, and my year as GRSS president
is coming to an end. I am very grateful to all of the volunteers and members working to foster GRSS activities at
different levels. I hope that what we have done this year
has been useful to them and has made their experience as
GRSS members more enjoyable. If this is the case, please
tell your colleagues and fellow researchers. We need more
members to enable even better and more interesting service to the community in the future. If instead this is not
the case, please let us know how we can improve; there is
always room for that!
GRS

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IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2019
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2019
