OPENING CEREMONY SPEAKERS
DR. JÜRGEN DOLD
Dr. Juergen Dold, President Hexagon Geosystems and member of the Hexagon AB Group Management. Juergen Dold has been part of Hexagon since 1995. Before his time at Hexagon, Dold served as academic counsel and assistant professor at Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, and various management positions within Leica Geosystems. Juergen Dold holds a diploma degree in Geodesy from the University Bonn, Germany and PHD from the University of Federal Armed Forces Germany in Munich.
PROF. NADIA MAGNENAT THALMANN
Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 30 years. She obtained several Bachelor's and Master's degrees in various disciplines (Psychology, Biology and Biochemistry) and a PhD in Quantum Physics from the University of Geneva in 1977. From 1977 to 1989, she was a Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada and then Professor at the University of Geneva.
In 1989, she founded the interdisciplinary research group MIRALab at the University of Geneva (www.miralab.ch). Her global domain of research is Virtual Humans and Social Robots. She has coordinated several projects, the most recent one is the Marie Curie Project MULTISCALE HUMAN (http://multiscalehuman.miralab.ch/). More recently, she has worked on the social autonomous robot Nadine alike of herself that is able to speak, recognize people and gestures, express mood and emotions, and remember actions. She is a Member and President of high level international evaluation committees, among the recent ones the Jury of the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, the Advisory Board for Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Review Panel in Ottawa and the European Research Council (ERC). During her Career, she has received more than 30 Awards such as “Woman in the Year”, the early recognition in Montreal in 1987, Doctor Honoris Causa in Natural Sciences from the Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany in 2009, the Distinguished Career Award from the European Association for Computer Graphics in Norrkoping, Sweden and an Honorary Doctorate of the University in Ottawa in 2010, a Career Achievement Award from the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society in Toronto in 2012, and the Humboldt Research Award in Germany.
Besides directing her research group MIRALab in Switzerland, she is presently Visiting Professor and Director of the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Professor Berkman is an internationally-renown scientist, explorer, educator and author who has made significant contributions to the sustainable development of our world during the past three decades. He is especially motivated to establish connections between science, diplomacy and information technology to promote cooperation and prevent discord for good governance of regions beyond sovereign jurisdictions – which account for nearly 70% of the Earth.
Prof.Dr.-Ing. Deren LI, a scientist in photogrammetry, remote sensing and geo-information, with dual membership of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, member of the Euro-Asia International Academy of Science and honorary doctorate of ETH. He is the Professor of Wuhan University, Chairman of the Academic Committee of Wuhan University and the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing. He served as Comm.III and Comm.VI president in 1988-1992 and 1992-1996. He has been elected as ISPRS fellow and honorary member in 2010 and 2012 respectively.
Dr. Shailesh Nayak has been providing leadership to earth system sciences for improving forecast for weather, climate and hazards since 2008. He obtained PhD degree in Geology from the M.S University of Baroda in 1980. He has set up the state-of-the-art tsunami warning system. He pioneered application of remote sensing for coastal and marine environment, and developed services for fishery and ocean state. He was conferred the prestigious ISC Vikram Sarabhai Memorial Award 2012. He is Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, the International Society of Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing, and elected member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He has published 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Alberto Moreira is Director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and a Full Professor with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, in the field of microwave remote sensing. His DLR’s Institute contributes to several scientific programs and projects for airborne and spaceborne SAR missions. The mission TanDEM‐X, led by his Institute, has successfully started the operational phase in December 2010 and is generating a global, high-resolution digital elevation model of the Earth with unprecedented accuracy. Prof. Moreira is the initiator and Principal Investigator for this mission.
Mladen has over 15 years of combined experience across Hexagon companies. During his career, Mladen has held senior leadership positions at Leica Geosystems, Intergraph, and now Hexagon Geospatial. As the President of Hexagon Geospatial, Mladen leads all areas of the business, ensuring a positive customer experience from development and product management to customer support, marketing, and sales. His overarching goal is to lead the company and the industry into a new era of innovation
Dr. Tomáš Pajdla received the MSc and PhD degrees from the Czech Technical University in Prague. He works in geometry and algebra of computer vision and robotics with emphasis on nonclassical cameras, 3D reconstruction, and industrial vision. He contributed to introducing epipolar geometry of panoramic cameras, non-central camera models generated by linear mapping, generalised epipolar geometries, developing solvers for minimal problems in structure from motion and to solving image matching problem. He coauthored works awarded the best paper prize at OAGM 1998 and 2013, BMVC 2002 and ACCV 2014. He is a member of the IEEE. Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gnR4zf8AAAAJ
Cyrill Stachniss is a full professor for photogrammetry at the University of Bonn. Before working in Bonn, he was a lecturer at the University of Freiburg in Germany, a guest lecturer at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, and a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Cyrill Stachniss finished his habilitation in 2009 and received his PhD thesis entitled “Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots” supervised by Wolfram Burgard at the University of Freiburg in 2006. From 2008-2013, he was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. He currently is a senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Daniel Sui is currently a Professor of Geography and Distinguished Professor of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the Ohio State University (OSU). He served as Chair of Geography (2011-2015) and as Director of the Center for Urban & Regional Analysis (CURA) (2009-2012) at OSU. Sui also holds adjunct professorship at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, Knowlton School of Architecture (City & Regional Planning Program), and College of Public Health at OSU. Prior assuming his current position at OSU in July 2009, Daniel Sui was a professor of geography (1993-2009) and holder of the Reta A. Haynes endowed chair (2001-2009) at Texas A&M University. He holds a B.S. (1986) and M.S. (1989) from Peking University and Ph.D. from University of Georgia (1993). His research current interests include GIScience and cartographic theory, location-based social media, open/alternative GIS, and Deep Web/Darknet. Sui was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, 2006 winner of the Michael Breheny Prize for best paper in Environment and Planning, and 2014 recipient of the distinguished scholar award from the Association of American Geographers. Sui was also awarded the 2015 Public Policy Scholar in residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He served on the U.S. National Mapping Science Committee for two terms (2007-2013) and currently serves as editor-in-chief for GeoJournal. More information about Sui’s current research can be found at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Sui
Heide joined ICSU as Executive Director in March 2015, following eight years as Executive Director of the International Social Science Council. Heide read for a M.Phil in contemporary social theory at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and holds a PhD in science and technology studies from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. She has worked as a science policy maker, researcher and consultant in the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Before moving into the world of the international councils, Heide worked as Head of the Department of International Relations and Quality Assessment of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her career in science policy dates back to the early 1990s when she worked at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. Heide holds membership of several international advisory committees, including the Scientific Advisory Board of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and the Swedish Research Council’s Committee for Development Research, Sweden. She is a Board member of START, as well as Cape Farewell in the UK.
Ming-Hsiang (Ming) Tsou is currently a full Professor of Geography and the
Director of the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) at San Diego
State University (SDSU) in U.S.A. Tsou received his Ph.D. (2001) in Geography from the
University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests are in Human Dynamics,
Social Media, Big Data, Web GIS, Mobile GIS, Cartography, and K-12 GIS
education. He is co-author of Internet GIS, published in 2003 by Wiley and served on
the editorial boards of the Annals of GIS (2008-), Cartography and GIScience (2013-)
and the Professional Geographers (2011-). Tsou has been served on two U.S. National
Academy of Science Committees in 2006 and 2013. In 2010, Tsou was awarded to a
$1.3 million research grant funded by National Science Foundation, "Mapping ideas from
Cyberspace to Realspace" (http://mappingideas.sdsu.edu/) research project (PI, 2010-
2014). In Spring 2014, Tsou established a new research center, the Center for Human
Dynamics in the Mobile Age (http://humandynamics.sdsu.edu/), a transdisciplinary
research area of excellence to integrate research works from GIScience, Public Health,
Social Science, Sociology, and Communication. Recently, Tsou received another large
NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research (IBSS) award for
“Spatiotemporal Modeling of Human Dynamics Across Social Media and Social
Networks” (PI, $999,887, 2014-2019) (http://socialmedia.sdsu.edu). This large
interdisciplinary research project studies human dynamics across social media and
social networks, focusing on information diffusion modeling over time and space, and the
connection between online activities and real world human behaviors. More information
about Ming’s research can be found at: http://map.sdsu.edu/tsou/
