IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2020 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY PAOLO GAMBA

2020: A Year of Challenges and Triumphs

T

he year 2020 has been quite an unusual one, very
different from what anyone could have expected. We
had to face many challenges, solve unexpected issues,
deal with unusual situations, and experiment with new
ideas and solutions to achieve our goals. Now, at the end
of the year, I am glad to report to our membership that
the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)
been successful in these efforts. We feel that we have created new and positive experiences, gained much useful
knowledge, and reinforced the bonds among the many
communities that form our Society.
As a first example, I am extremely glad to report
that our flagship conference, the IEEE International
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
2020 (www.igarss2020.org), was a great success even
under difficult circumstances, with the largest number
of attendees ever. Despite the limitations imposed by
the relatively short time allocated for paper presentations, the new methodology requiring a recorded video and a live Q&A session, and the need to conduct
many sessions in parallel to enable attendance from
California to Australia and New Zealand, the general
feedback from authors has been very positive. Interactions among attendees were still possible and fruitful, and our experience in 2020 provides many ideas
and recommendations for IGARSS 2021, to be held
next July in Brussels, Belgium (check www.igarss2021.
com for news and updates). The general cochairs and
technical program cochairs of IGARSS 2020 were able
to overcome the difficulties of moving a large conference completely online, thanks to the dedication of the
entire local organizing committee, the session chairs'
volunteer work, and the dedicated participation of
many young and dedicated session managers. The contributions of these groups of volunteers, who acted as

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2020.3037005
Date of current version: 16 December 2020

6

a single team, were truly essential to transform the potential failure of a conference limited by the COVID-19
pandemic into a huge success.
IGARSS was not the only successful GRSS conference
this year. Indeed, 2020 was intended to be the year of
GRSS regional conferences. The first of those planned for
2020, the Mediterranean and Middle-East Geoscience
and Remote Sensing Symposium (M2GARSS) for the
Mediterranean and Middle East region, was successfully
held in Tunisia in early March. After COVID-19 started
spreading, the other two conferences had either to move
online or be cancelled. The Latin American GRSS/International Society for Photogrammetry Remote Sensing Conference (LAGIRS) was cancelled, but GRSS was
able to publish the papers accepted for presentation at
LAGIRS on IEEE Xplore. The second regional conference
planned for 2020, the India Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Symposium (InGARSS), decided to hold a reduced-size conference fully online in 2020, followed by
an in-person workshop in 2021. Both cases demonstrate
that dedicated GRSS volunteers-and their commitment
to the knowledge-sharing approach pursued by GRSS-
could achieve partial successes even when the odds were
against them.
Another very similar great success due to a team effort is the series of ad hoc webinars organized by the
Technical, Industry, and Education team, together
with GRSS Chapters and technical committees. These
webinars, delivered online and made available on the
GRSS YouTube channel (see https://www.youtube.com/
channel/UCNOdGBo--6UVCiwKSNTMqyg), are intended to share best practices, foster collaborations, introduce technical activities, and engage potential new
members among individuals interested in topics in the
field that characterize our Society. These webinars have
been, and continue to be, quite popular. They provide a
new method to share information within GRSS and to
increase the interest of researchers and practitioners of
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2020
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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2020

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