EO4UA - Earth Observation for Ukraine

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.

Main contact point is our web page, which is available at https://www.eo4ua.org. Under the 'About' section you can read about the initiative and there is also a contact for us. If you develop an interesting data set that you would like to add to the initiative, you can put it online somewhere, such as Google Drive, and send the link to us, so we that can put it in our public S3 buckets. The idea behind our repository is that it is federated. We can include in our repository data from different platforms because it only contains header files, which leads you to the different clouds.

Currently we don't have such a space, but it is good idea. Our ministries, such as Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Infrastructure, and Ministry of environment, need various data - so talking to them might be useful. 

Basically we are a bottom up initiative. We are looking for financing on the way and so far we managed to fix two sources: Network of Resources (NoR) from ESA and OKRA. This was just to provide the cloud computing and also the very high resolution data which is only available commercially. Our advice for anybody who would like to do something for Ukraine is first of all to contact us because we know the ways where to go for example, to look for financing. I mean ESA is very happy to or very involved in financing the research for Ukraine. We can have a quick feasibility study and then you can go to the NoR for full implementation. For a NoR request you get an answer within few few days, so basically it is a very quick and robust way to obtain the access to the cloud resources. The other option OKRA is for the research institutes. There will be another OKRA call soon, so I we also invite everybody to to look at it.