Advisory Board

Dr. Yannis Avrithis is a Research Director in the Information Management Systems Institute of Athena Research Center, carrying out research on computer vision and machine learning. His recent work is focusing on different learning settings including metric learning, incremental learning and few-shot learning; multimodal learning including vision, language and 3D models; interpretability; and video question answering. Before that he was at the LinkMedia team of Inria Rennes-Bretagne Atlantique, France, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, where he led the Image and Video Analysis (IVA) team. He holds the HDR qualification from University of Rennes 1, PhD and Diploma degrees from NTUA and MSc degree from Imperial College, University of London, UK. He has been involved in 16 European, 6 French and 10 Greek research projects, he has co-supervised 17 Ph.D. theses and 19 Diploma/Masters theses, and he has published 4 theses, 3 edited volumes, 30 articles in journals, 117 in conferences and workshops, 8 book chapters and 31 technical reports in the above fields. He has contributed to the organization of 23 conferences and workshops. He has served as associate editor in 2 scientific journals and as a reviewer in 15 journals and 15 conferences. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ELLIS, ACM, EURASIP and the Technical Chamber of Greece.

Dr. Mihai Datcu is Senior Scientist and Data Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery research group leader with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) of DLR and Professor with the Department of Applied Electronics and Information Engineering, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, UPB. From 1992 to 2002, he had an Invited Professor Assignment with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Switzerland. From 2005 to 2013 he has been Professor holder of the DLR-CNES Chair at ParisTech, Paris Institute of Technology, Telecom Paris. His research interests include explainable and physics aware Artificial Intelligence, smart sensors design, and quantum machine learning with applications in Earth Observation. He is involved in AI and Big Data from Space, European, ESA, NASA and national research programs and projects. He is a member of the ESA Big Data from Space Working Group and Visiting Professor withe ESA's Φ-Lab. He received in 2006 the Best Paper Award, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Prize, in 2008 the National Order of Merit with the rank of Knight, for outstanding international research results, awarded by the President of Romania, and he was awarded the Chaire d'excellence internationale Blaise Pascal 2017 for international recognition in the field of data science in earth observation, and the 2018 Ad Astra Award for Excellence in Science. He is IEEE Fellow.

Maria Teresa is the Information Management Coordinator at IDMC. Maria Teresa provides technical support to different workstreams of IDMC such as implementation and development of IM strategies and standards, the design of analytical and data visualization processes and systems, and collaborates with partner organizations to support different research and data sharing initiatives. Maria Teresa holds a Master's in Environmental Science from the University of Geneva, as well as professional certifications in Geomatics and Remote Sensing. She also holds a bachelor's degree in Environmental Engineering from the Catholic University of Bolivia. She is particularly interested in understanding the connections between climate change, disaster risk, and internal displacement.

Stefano M. Iacus, PhD, is a Project Officer at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, formerly full professor of statistics at the University of Milan. He has been a member of the R Core Team (1999-2014) for the development of the R statistical environment and now member of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include simulation and inference for stochastic processes, computational statistics, causal inference, text mining and sentiment analysis. Now into migration, mobility and demography.

Stefanos Kollias is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, since 1997, member of the Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory. He has been a Founding Professor of Machine Learning in College of Science, Lincoln University, starting from September 2016. He is an IEEE Fellow. He has been member of the Executive Committee of the European Neural Network Society (2007-2016). He has produced a world leading research activity in machine learning, intelligent systems, semantic multimedia analysis, semantic metadata interoperability, affective computing. He is a member of the EC Expert Group on Cultural Heritage, Fellow of High-Education Academy and Fellow of the Centre for Culture and Creativity, UK. He has published more than 110 papers in international journals and more than 200 papers in proceedings of international conferences. His research has more than 12000 citations with an h-index of 52 in Google Scholar and he has supervised 44 Ph.D. students.

Pierre-Philippe Mathieu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppmathieu/) is heading the Φ-lab Explore Office at the European Space Agency in ESRIN (Frascati, Italy), aiming to connect people, ideas and digital technologies to help shape the future of Earth Observation. He spent 20+ years working in the field of environmental and ocean modelling, weather risk management and remote sensing. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and M.Sc from University of Liege (Belgium), a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Louvain (Belgium), and a Management degree from the University of Reading Business School (UK).

Dr. Jesús San Miguel is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the EC Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in the field of forestry. He is the leader of the FOREST Project “Forest Data and Information Systems” at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, and he is responsible for the scientific coordination of forest monitoring activities and for the development and operation of European forest monitoring systems. These include the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and the European Forest Data Centre. He has extensive experience and publications on forest and forest fire research, acting in teams of specialists and advisory groups of international organizations as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Food and Agriculture Organization and the Ministerial Conference for the Protection of Forests in Europe. He holds MSc and PhD degrees on Remote Sensing and GIS by the University of California Berkeley and a Forest Engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

Dr. Stefano Salvi is Technological Director at the Osservatorio Nazionale Terremoti - Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, Italy. He is experienced in the use of optical and radar remote sensing for different geological/geophysical applications. He has published over 70 papers in International Scientific Indexing (ISI) journals. He has been PI or co-PI for several national and international projects on the use of Remote Sensing data and techniques for geophysical applications. He is a member of the CEOS Working Group on Disasters, co-Lead of the CEOS Seismic Demonstrator, Chair of the GEO Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratories initiative, and Coordinator of the EPOS-IT Joint Research Unit.