Keynote Speakers (alphabetical order)
Zhongxin Chen
Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Dr. Zhongxin Chen got his BSc degree in Geography from Peking University in 1991, MSc and PhD degrees in Botany (Ecology) from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994 and 1998 respectively.
He is Senior Information Technology Officer at Information Technology Division in FAO. His main work is using geospatial information technology supporting digital innovation in agriculture at the organization. Before joining FAO, he was a research professor at Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning (IARRP), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. He was the director of Department of Remote Sensing and Digital Agriculture at IARRP. He was honored ‘National Outstanding Agronomist’ in 2015. His main research interests include agricultural remote sensing, geo-spatial modeling in agriculture, quantitative remote sensing and data assimilation, agricultural information system development and standardization, and so on. He has been PI for more than 50 national, ministerial and international scientific research projects. He has published more than 200 papers, books, book chapters, and reports. He has been granted with 3 national sci-tech advancement awards by the Chinese central government.
Mutlu Ozdogan
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Dr. Ozdogan received a B.Sc. degree in Geological Engineering from Istanbul University in Turkey, followed by a M.Sc. in Geology from North Carolina State University and a M.A. degree in Environmental Remote sensing from Boston University. He then continued at Boston University to receive a Ph.D. degree in Geography and Environment in 2004. While at Boston, he worked at the Center for Remote Sensing on various projects related to water resource scarcity and satellite-assisted methods to search for additional resources in the Middle East. Dr. Ozdogan is currently developing a dataset on global irrigation extent with the help of satellite observations. This dataset, in conjunction with irrigation water use models, are used to assess irrigation feedback on climate and the sustainability of agricultural water resources that, by extension, affect global food security and human vulnerability. He has been supported by research grants from NASA, NSF, and governments of Oman and United Arab Emirates.
Ingo Simonis
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Dr. Ingo Simonis serves as Director of Interoperability Programs and Science at the Open Geospatial Consortium, OGC; the worldwide leading Standards Development Organization for geospatial data and data processing. He is responsible for the integration of scientific results produced by the global geospatial data processing community into OGC’s software architecture and internal research and development programs. Working closely with OGC’s CTO, he develops OGC’s scientific strategies and technology road mapping and serves as lead architect for OGC’s main research and consultancy projects on software architecture and distributed geo-spatial computing.
John P. Verboncoeur
Michigan State University
John P. Verboncoeur received his B.S. (1986) in engineering science from the University of Florida and his M.S. (1987) and his Ph.D. (1992) in nuclear engineering from the University of California-Berkeley (UCB), holding the DOE Magnetic Fusion Energy Technology Fellowship. After serving as a joint postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UCB in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), he was appointed associate research engineer in UCB-EECS, and to the UCB nuclear engineering faculty in 2001, attaining full professor in 2008. In 2011, he was appointed professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University. His teaching includes electromagnetics, plasma physics, neutronics, engineering analysis and computation.
He is the author/coauthor of the MSU (formerly Berkeley) suite of particle-in-cell Monte Carlo (PIC-MC) codes, including XPDP1 and XOOPIC, used by more than 1,000 researchers worldwide with more than 350 journal publications in the past decade. He has authored/coauthored more than 350 journal articles and conference papers, with more than 2,850 citations, and has taught 13 international workshops and mini-courses on plasma simulation.
He served as the chair of the Computational Engineering Science Program at UCB from 2001-2010. He is currently an associate editor for Physics of Plasmas, and has served as a guest editor and/or frequent reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, and a number of other plasma and computational journals. He has served as a session organizer or technical area coordinator for eight IEEE International Conferences on Plasma Science and one IEEE International Power modulator and High Voltage Conference. In 2013, he served as the technical program co-chair for the IEEE Pulsed Power & Plasma Science Conference. He is currently president of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society.
more to be confirmed…