IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2017 - 93

and future technologies in the Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes. He is associate editor for IEEE Transactions
on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and a Fellow of the IEEE.
yves-Louis Desnos (yves-louis.desnos@esa.int) heads
the research and development section in the Directorate
of Earth Observation Programmes of the European Space
Agency (ESA) European Space Research Institute, Frascati,
Italy. In 2006, he was appointed an ESA senior advisor on
synthetic aperture radar technologies and applications.
Michael Rast (michael.rast@esa.int) received his doctorate in geology from the University of Munich, Germany, in
1992. He is head of the Science Strategy, Coordination, and
Planning Office in the Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes, European Space Agency (ESA). He joined ESA in
1985 and was mainly involved in establishing science and
mission requirements for Earth observation satellite sensors.
Between 1993 and 2005, he headed the Land/Surfaces Unit
at ESA's Mission Science Division, the Netherlands. From
2008 to 2011, he headed the Planning Office in the Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes and is currently head
of its Science Strategy, Coordination and Planning Office.
He also holds a professorship and teaching affiliation for
terrestrial remote sensing with the Department for Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich.
Carsten brockmann (carsten.brockmann@brockmannconsult.de) is managing director of Brockmann Consulting,
Germany, a company he founded in 1999 that provides consultancy, information products, and software connected to
environmental data. A special focus of his work is on developing and applying tools to effectively work with optical
remote-sensing data, ranging from instrument tool boxes to
big-data processing systems.
Linda See (see@iiasa.ac.at) received her Ph.D. degree in
spatial applications of fuzzy logic from the University of
Leeds, United Kingdom, where she was a senior lecturer in
computational geography and geographic information systems for more than a decade. She is a research scholar with
the Ecosystems Services and Management Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
She spent a year at the Max Planck Institute for Atmospheric
Sciences in Germany, followed by four years at the Food and
Agriculture Organization in Rome, Italy, working in agrometeorology and early warning for food security. She is an
active member of the Geo-Wiki team and has worked on a
number of crowdsourcing aspects.
Steffen Fritz (fritz@iiasa.ac.at) leads the Earth Observation Systems Group in the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA) Ecosystem Services and Management Program. He joined IIASA in 2007, and since then he
has become the initiator and driving force behind Geo-Wiki.
org and Geo-Wiki mobile, a global land-cover validation tool
that aims to investigate and reduce the uncertainties in global
land-cover data using crowdsourcing. His research interests
include citizen science, food security, land use, global and regional vegetation monitoring, crop-yield and crop-acreage estimations, and using crowdsourcing in developing countries.
june 2017

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

Ravi Kapur (ravi.kapur@imperativespace.com) is founder and managing director of Imperative Space and GovEd
Communications, which provide creative, media, education,
consultancy, and design services for the science, space, environmental, and government sectors, including in Earth-observation-related areas. He has wide-ranging experience in
science communication, education, and media innovation,
and has worked on numerous space-related creative communications and education projects. His multidisciplinary
background also includes data visualization, interactive
technology, educational policy, and public sector innovation, as well as over 20 years of film-making experience. He
was previously head of Innovation Challenges for the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in
the United Kingdom.
Miguel Mahecha (mmahecha@bgc-jena.mpg.de), a
geoecologist by training, leads the research group Empirical Inference in the Earth System at the Max Planck Institute
for Biogeochemistry. He developed the concept of the Earth
System Data Cube for the European Space Agency and is exploring new avenues of data-driven science in this context.
His main interests are the effect of climate extremes on the
Earth system and its implications.
Ursula benz (ubenz@cloudeo-ag.com) received her
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from FernUniversitaet Hagen, Germany. She started her career at the German
Aerospace Center, where she led research for on-board synthetic aperture radar data analysis and compression. She
has been a member of the management board of CloudEO
since 2013. As managing director at Definiens Imaging, she
helped to drive the global geospatial business.

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http://www.consult.de http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital http://www.economist.com/node/15557443 https://www.atkearney.com/documents/ http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - June 2017