The Earth Observation for Ukraine (EO4UA) has been initiated to support Ukrainian and international authorities in assessing war-related environmental losses by provisioning processing capabilities combined with a large repository of satellite data and higher-level products generated by the EO4UA partners. The initiative has also fostered a synergy between numerous projects focused on Ukraine running on the CREODIAS platform. Within the EO4UA repository there are "core" data sets (e.g. Sentinel products, crop classifications, boundaries of agricultural fields, etc.) which are indispensable for versatile environmental analyses. Results of analyses conducted by end-users, together with generated products are also stored within the repository to facilitate consecutive research studies. The members of the EO4UA initiative are EO professionals from private, public and academic sectors willing to support Ukraine by providing state-of-the-art expertise in EO analytics and by cooperating with the Ukrainian scientists. The EO4UA initiative is open for new members who wish to make a significant contribution to help Ukraine.
During the Big Geodata Talk, Dr. Jan Musial (Senior Data Scientists, CloudFerro) and Dr. Jędrzej Bojanowski (Manager Data Science, CloudFerro), and Prof. Dr. Nataliia Kussul (Department Chair, National Technical University of Ukraine "Kyiv Polytechnic Institute") will present the current status of the EO4UA initiative, the unique products generated by the members and end-users, and what has been learnt so far about the environmental damages in Ukraine caused by the Russian invasion.
Speakers
Dr. Jan Musial specializes in application of satellite imagery in various environmental analyses such as: agriculture monitoring, cloud masking, soil moisture retrieval and climate change. He received Master of Arts diploma from the Inter-Faculty Studies in Environmental Protection at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Further, he continued his education at the postgraduate studies in Spatial Information Systems at the Warsaw University of Technology. Jan started his research career as a trainee at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. Further, he continued his research work as a PhD student of the Remote Sensing Group at the University of Bern in Switzerland. After obtaining the PhD diploma Jan held an honorary fellowship position at the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Madison in USA. After the fellowship, he held an associate professor position at the Remote Sensing Group of the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography in Warsaw in Poland. In 2014 he received an award from the Polish Ministry of Higher Education for outstanding young researcher. He also held twice the EUMETSAT visiting scientist position at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI). Currently, Jan works as a Senior Data Scientist at the CloudFerro company which develops and operates large cloud computing infrastructures combined with a massive EO Data repository such as CREODIAS, WEkEO, Copernicus Climate Data Store, CODE-DE, EO LAB.
Dr. Jędrzej Bojanowski specializes in application of satellite data in environmental studies: climatology and monitoring of agriculture. He received a PhD degree in 2014 from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente. He gained further experience as an employee of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy), a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss Federal Institute for Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) in Zurich and assistant professor and a deputy head of Remote Sensing Centre of the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography in Warsaw, Poland. He carried out ESA- and EUMETSAT-funded projects aiming at generation of ECVs of cloud physical properties from polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites. He was also a principal investigator of ESA projects related to satellite identification and monitoring of agricultural crops for public administration. He received an award of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for Outstanding Young Scientists. Currently he leads the Data Science department at CloudFerro, a company providing cloud computing infrastructures and EO data repositories such as CREODIAS.
Nataliia Kussul is a Professor, Doctor of sciences in Applied Mathematics. Her research interests are advanced methods, models and emerging technologies in the area of data science for heterogeneous data fusion, processing and analysis, and their application in different applied domains, for example. agriculture and food security, risk analysis, disaster monitoring and management, and information security (in particular, trust management). In the last 10 years her work has been continuously focused on how information technologies of computational intelligence and geospatial analysis can trigger development and innovations, in particular in the field of distributed systems, environmental and agricultural monitoring and management. At the same time she is highly motivated in teaching and supervising of BSc, MSc and PhD students. The team of young scientists working under the leadership of Nataliia Kussul is involved into international programs, initiatives and working groups, such as Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), Global Agriculture Monitoring System (GLAM), Joint Experiment of Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM), United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER) as well as international projects.
