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ConferenCe rePorTs

T he IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society’s 2013 Publications Awards were presented at the

IGARSS Awards Banquet on Thursday, July 25 at the Plaza Ballroom. Situated in the heart of Collins Street at Melbourne’s famous Regent Theatre, the prestigious Plaza Ballroom is reminiscent of the grand European ballrooms of the 19th Century. Built in 1929, the venue has undergone meticulous restoration return-ing it to its breathtaking former glory.

The following awards and recognitions were pre-sented by GRSS President Melba Crawford and GRSS Publications Awards Chair Martti Hallikainen during the dinner:

◗ Transactions Prize Paper Award ◗ Letters Prize Paper Award ◗ J-STARS Prize Paper Award ◗ Highest Impact Paper Award ◗ Symposium Prize Paper Award ◗ Symposium Interactive Prize Paper Award ◗ Three Student Prize Paper Awards ◗ Certificate of Recognition.

1. IEEE GRSS TRanSacTIonS PRIzE PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the Transactions Prize Paper Award to recognize authors who have published an exceptional paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing during the past calendar year. When selecting the paper, other factors considered are origi-nality and clarity of the paper. The Award consists of a Certificate and an honorarium of $3000, equally divided between the authors.

The 2013 Transactions Prize Paper Award is pre-sented to Thomas Meissner and Frank J. Wentz, with the citation: For a very significant contribution to the field of endeavor of the IEEE GRS Society in the paper authored by Thomas Meissner and Frank J. Wentz, entitled ”The Emissiv-ity of the Ocean Surface between 6 and 90 GHz over a Large Range of Wind Speeds and Earth Incidence Angles,” pub-lished in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 50, No. 8, pp. 3004–3026, August 2012.

Thomas Meissner (M’02, SM’13) received the B.S. in physics from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Ger-many, in 1983, the M.S. (Diploma) in physics from the University of Bonn, Germany, in 1987 and the Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Bochum, Ger-many, in 1991. Between 1992 and 1998 he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, the University of South Carolina, Colum-bia, SC, and at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in Theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics.

In 1998, he joined Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), Santa Rosa, CA. Since then, he has been working on the development and refinement of radiative transfer mod-els, calibration, validation and ocean retrieval algo-rithms for various microwave instruments (SSM/I, TMI, AMSR-E, WindSat, CMIS, SSMIS, GMI, AQUARIUS).

Dr. Meissner has been serving on the review panel for the National Academies’ Committee on Radio Frequencies (CORF). As member of the AQUARIUS

Grss Publications Awards Presented at IGArss 2013 Banquet

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2013.2289863 Date of publication: 2 January 2014

MarTTi Hallikainen and Werner Wiesbeck,IEEE GRSS Awards Committee Co-Chairs

FIGuRE 1. The venue for the Awards Banquet was Plaza Ball-room in Melbourne.

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Launch, Early Orbit Operations and Commissioning Team he has been recognized with the NASA Group Achieve-ment Award in 2012.

Frank J. Wentz has a B.S. (1969) and M.S. (1971) in phys-ics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1974, he established Remote Sensing Systems, a research company specializing in satellite microwave remote sensing of the Earth. His past research focused on radiative transfer mod-els that relate satellite observations to geophysical param-eters, with the objective of providing reliable geophysical data sets to the Earth science community. As a member of NASA’s SeaSat Experiment Team (1978–1982), he pioneered the development of physically based retrieval methods for microwave scatterometers and radiometers. Starting in 1987, he took the lead on providing the worldwide research community with high-quality ocean products derived from satellite microwave imagers (SSM/I). As the president of RSS, he oversees the production and validation of climate-quality satellite products. These data are dispersed via the company’s web and FTP sites.

He is currently a member of NASA Advanced Micro-wave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) Team, NASA Ocean Vector Wind Science (OVWST) Team, the AQUARIUS Launch, Early Orbit Operations and Commissioning Team and NASA REASoN DISCOVER Project. He has served on many NASA review panels, the National Research Coun-cil’s Earth Studies Board, the National Research Council’s

Panel on Reconciling Temperature Observations. He is a Lead Author for CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Product on Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere. He is currently working on scatterometer/radiometer combina-tions, satellite-derived decadal time series of atmospheric moisture and temperature, the measurement of sea- surface temperature through clouds, and advanced micro-wave sensor designs for climatological studies.

Mr. Wentz is Fellow Member of the American Geo-physical Union. As member of the AQUARIUS Launch, Early Orbit Operations and Commissioning Team he has been recognized with the NASA Group Achievement Award in 2012.

2. IEEE GRSS LETTERS PRIzE PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the Letters Prize Paper Award to recognize the author(s) who has published in the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters during the previ-ous calendar year an exceptional paper in terms of con-tent and impact on the GRS Society. If a suitable paper cannot be identified from among those published dur-ing the calendar year, papers published in prior years, and subsequently recognized as being meritorious, may be considered. When selecting the paper, originality, impact, scientific value and clarity are factors considered. Prize: Certificate and $1500, equally divided between the authors.

FIGuRE 2. Music was presented by Jacqueline Gawler (vocals), Gideon Brazil (flute), and Ryan Griffith (guitar).

FIGuRE 4. Transactions Prize Paper Award recipients Thomas Meissner (left) and Frank J. Wentz with Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 3. GRSS Publications Awards Chair Martti Hallikainen started the Awards Ceremony.

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The 2013 Letters Prize Paper Award is presented to Luis Gómez-Chova, Luis Robert Jenssen and Gustavo Camps-Valls with the citation: “For a very significant con-tribution to the field of endeavor of the IEEE GRS Society in the paper authored by Luis Gómez-Chova, Luis Robert Jenssen, and Gustavo Camps-Valls entitled “Kernel Entropy Component Analysis for Remote Sensing Image Clustering,” published in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 312–316, March 2012.”

Luis Gómez-Chova (S’08–M’09) received the B.Sc. (with first-class honors), M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in electronics engineering from the University of Valen-cia, Spain, in 2000, 2002, and 2008, respectively. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Electronics Engineering and researcher at the Image Pro-cessing Laboratory in the University of Valencia. He has completed different research stays at the European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) of the European Space Agency (Jul–Dec 2003), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Munich (Jul–Sep 2004), the Università Degli Studi di Trento in Italy (Jun–Aug 2007), and the Technical Uni-versity of Denmark (DTU-Space) in Copenhagen (Jul–Aug 2010). His work is mainly related to pattern recog-nition and machine learning applied to remote sensing multispectral images and cloud screening. He conducts and supervises research on these topics within the framework of sev-eral national and international projects. He is the author of more than 30 interna-tional journal papers, more than 90 inter-national conference papers, and several international book chapters. He is a also referee of many international journals and serves on the program committees of sev-eral international conferences.

Dr. Gómez-Chova was awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education with the National Award for Electronic Engi-neering. He has been the recipient of the 2008 European Best IEEE GRSS PhD The-

sis Award, as well as the 2008 Best PhD Thesis Award of the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). His paper “Kernel Entropy Com-ponent Analysis for Remote Sensing Image Clustering” was the Editor’s Choice Paper of the March 2012 issue of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

Robert Jenssen received the degree of Dr. Scient. (Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering in 2005 from the Uni-versity of Tromsø (UiT), Norway, where he is currently an associate professor at the Department of Physics and Tech-nology. Jenssen is also a research professor at the Norwe-gian Center for Telemedicine and Integrated Care. Jenssen was a visiting guest researcher at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Compute, Cognitive Systems Section with L. K. Hansen) 2012/2013, at the Technical Univer-sity of Berlin, 2008/2009 (Machine Learning Group with K.-R. Muller) and at the University of Florida, 2002/2003 and March/April 2004 (Computational NeuroEngineer-ing Laboratory with J.C. Principe). In his research, he has focused on developing an information theoretic approach to machine learning based on Renyi entropy, with strong connections to Mercer kernel methods and to spectral clustering and dimensionality reduction methods. Jens-sen received “Honorable Mention for the 2003 Pattern Recognition Journal Best Paper Award”, the “2005 IEEE ICASSP Outstanding Student Paper Award” and the “2007 UiT Young Investigator Award.” His paper “Kernel Entropy Component Analysis” was the Featured Paper of the May 2010 issue of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analy-sis and Machine Intelligence, and the paper “Kernel Entropy Component Analysis for Remote Sensing Image Cluster-ing,” co-authored by Jenssen, was the Editor’s Choice Paper of the March 2012 issue of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. Jenssen served on the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Machine Learning for Signal Process-ing Technical Committee 2006–2009, and is currently an Associate Editor of the journal Pattern Recognition.

Gustavo Camps-Valls (M’04, SM’07) received a Ph.D. degree in Physics (2002, summa cum laude) from the Uni-versitat de València, Spain, where he is currently an Asso-

ciate Professor in the Electrical Engineer-ing Dep. He teaches time series analysis, image processing, machine learning, and knowledge extraction for remote sensing. His research is conducted as Group Leader of the Image and Signal Processing (ISP) group, http://isp.uv.es, of the same univer-sity. He has been Visiting Researcher at the Remote Sensing Laboratory (Univ. Trento, Italy) in 2002, the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Ger-many) in 2009, and as Invited Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Laus-anne (Lausanne, Switzerland) in 2013. His research interests are tied to the develop-ment of machine learning algorithms for

FIGuRE 5. Recipients of the Letters Prize Paper Award Luis Gómez-Chova (left) and Gustavo Camps-Valls with Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 6. Recipient of the Letters Prize Paper Award Robert Jenssen.

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signal and image processing with special focus on remote sensing data analysis. He conducts and supervises research within the frameworks of several national and interna-tional projects, and he is Evaluator of project proposals and scientific organizations. He is the author (or co-author) of 95 international peer-reviewed journal papers, more than 120 international conference papers, 20 international book chapters, and editor of the books “Kernel methods in bio-engineering, signal and image processing” (IGI, 2007), “Kernel methods for remote sensing data analysis” (Wiley & Sons, 2009), and “Remote Sensing Image Processing” (MC, 2011). He’s a co-editor of the forthcoming book “Digi-tal Signal Processing with Kernel Methods” (Wiley & Sons, 2014). He holds a Hirsch’s index ,h 28= entered the ISI list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2011, and he is a co-author of the 3 most highly cited papers in relevant remote sensing journals. Thomson Reuters identified one of his papers as a Fast Moving Front research. He is a referee of many inter-national journals and conferences, and currently serves on the Program Committees of International Society for Opti-cal Engineers (SPIE) Europe, International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), and International Confer-ence on Image Processing (ICIP) among others. In 2007 he was elevated to IEEE Senior Member, and since 2007 he is member of the Data Fusion technical committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, and since 2009 he is member of the Machine Learning for Signal Pro-cessing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Process-ing Society. He is member of the MTG-IRS Science Team (MIST) of the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Sig-nal Processing Letters, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Let-ters, ISRN Signal Processing Journal, and Guest Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

3. IEEE GRSS J-STaRS PRIzE PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the J-STARS Prize Paper Award to recognize the author(s) who published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observa-tions and Remote Sensing during the previ-ous calendar year an exceptional paper in terms of content and impact on the GRS Society. When selecting the paper, other factors considered are originality, clarity and timeliness of the paper. IEEE member-ship is preferable. The Award consists of a Certificate and an honorarium of $1,500. If the paper has more than one author, the honorarium shall be shared.

The 2013 J-STARS Prize Paper Award is presented to Salman Saeed Khan and Raf-faella Guida with the citation: “For a very significant contribution to the field of endeavor of the IEEE GRS Society in the paper authored

by Salman Saeed Khan and Raffaella Guida entitled “On Single-Look Multivariate G Distribution for PolSAR Data,” published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 1149–1163, August 2012.”

Salman Saeed Khan (S’11) was born in 1982 in Lahore, Pakistan. He received the B.S. degree in Computer Sci-ences from National University of Computer and Emerg-ing Sciences, Pakistan in 2004, the M.S. degree in Elec-trical Engineering as a Fulbright scholar from University of Central Florida, Orlando, U.S.A. in 2009, and is cur-rently in the fourth year of Ph.D. degree in Electronics Engineering (Remote Sensing Applications group) at the Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey in Guildford, U.K. His current research interests include Statistical Sig-nal Processing in polarimetric SAR, and its applications in Pattern Recognition and Target Detection.

Raffaella Guida (S’04–M’08) was born in Naples, Italy, on October 24, 1975. She received the Laurea degree (cum laude) in Telecommunications Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineer-ing from the University of Naples Federico II, Naples, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. In 2003, she received a grant from the University of Naples Federico II to be spent at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engi-

neering (DIET) for research in the field of remote sensing. In 2006, she received a two-year grant from the University of Naples Federico II to be spent at DIET for research in electromagnetics, particularly on the topic of electromagnetic field prop-agation in an urban environment, within the Italian project S.Co.P.E. In 2006, she was also a Guest Scientist with the Depart-ment of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. In 2008, she joined the Surrey Space Centre (SSC), University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K., as Lecturer in Sat-ellite Remote Sensing. Today she is still in SSC where she leads the Remote Sensing

FIGuRE 7. J-STARS Prize Paper Award recipient Salman Saeed Khan with Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 8. J-STARS Prize Paper Award recipient Raffaella Guida.

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Applications group. Her main research interests are in the fields of electromagnetics and microwave remote sensing, particularly in simulation and modeling of synthetic aper-ture radar signals relevant to natural surfaces and urban scenes, new remote sensing mission concepts and applica-tions. She is involved as PI and co-I in many national and European research projects.

4. IEEE GRSS HIGHEST ImPacT PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the GRSS Highest Impact Paper Award to recognize the author(s) who has published during the past five years in an IEEE GRSS Journal the scientific paper that has received the highest number of citations and impact over the past five years as measured by the Thomson Reuters Web of Science citation index. A previously selected paper shall not be eligible for this award in the following years. The Award consists of a Certificate and an hono-rarium of $3,000. If the paper has more than one author, the honorarium shall be shared. The Highest Impact Paper Award was presented in 2012 for the first time.

The 2013 Highest Paper Award is presented to Mathieu Fauvel, Jon Atli Benediktsson, Jocelyn Chanussot, and Johannes R. Sveinsson with the citation: “For a very sig-nificant contribution to the field of endeavor of the IEEE GRS Society in the paper authored by Mathieu Fauvel, Jon Atli Bene-diktsson, Jocelyn Chanussot, and Johannes R. Sveinsson enti-tled “Spectral and Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Data using SVMs and Morphological Profiles,” published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 46, No. 11, pp. 3804–3814, November 2008.”

Mathieu Fauvel graduated in electrical engineering from the Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP), Grenoble, France, in 2004. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in image and signal processing from the Grenoble INP in 2004 and 2007, respectively. In 2007, he was a teaching assistant in Grenoble INP. From 2008 to 2010, he was a postdoctoral research associate with the MISTIS Team of the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). Since 2010, Dr. Fauvel has been an Assistant Professor with the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (ENSAT—University of Toulouse) within the DYNAFOR lab (Uni-versity of Toulouse—INRA). His research interests are remote sensing, data fusion, pattern recognition, multi-component signal and image processing.

Jón Atli Benediktsson received the Cand.Sci. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, in 1984, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. He is currently Pro Rector for Aca-demic Affairs and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iceland. His research interests are in remote sensing, biomedical analysis of signals, pattern recognition, image processing, and sig-nal processing, and he has published extensively in those fields. Prof. Benediktsson was the 2011–2012 President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) and has been on the GRSS AdCom since 2000. He was Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS) from 2003 to 2008 and has served as Associate Editor of TGRS since 1999 and the IEEE Geo-science and Remote Sensing Letters since 2003. He was the Chairman of the Steering Committee of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (J-STARS) 2007–2010. Prof. Benediktsson is a co-founder of the biomedical start up company Oxymap (www.oxymap.com). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fel-low of SPIE. He received the Stevan J. Kristof Award from Purdue University in 1991 as outstanding graduate student in remote sensing. In 1997, Dr. Benediktsson was the recipi-ent of the Icelandic Research Council’s Outstanding Young Researcher Award, in 2000, he was granted the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, in 2004, he was a co-recipient of the University of Iceland’s Technology Innovation Award, in 2006 he received the yearly research award from the Engi-neering Research Institute of the University of Iceland, and

FIGuRE 9. Jocelyn Chanussot (left) and Jon Atli Benediktsson received the Highest Impact Paper Award from Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 10. Recipients of the Highest Impact Paper Award Mathieu Fauvel (left) and Johannes R. Sveinsson (right).

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in 2007, he received the Outstanding Service Award from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. He is co-recipient of the 2012 IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing Paper Award. He is a member of Societas Scinetiarum Islandica and Tau Beta Pi.

Jocelyn Chanussot (M’04-SM’04-F’12) received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Greno-ble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP), Grenoble, France, in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree from Savoie Uni-versity, Annecy, France, in 1998. In 1999, he was with the Geography Imagery Perception Laboratory for the Del-egation Generale de l’Armement (DGA—French National Defense Department). Since 1999, he has been with Grenoble INP, where he was an Assistant Professor from 1999 to 2005, an Associate Professor from 2005 to 2007, and is currently a Professor of signal and image process-ing. He is conducting his research at the Grenoble Images Speech Signals and Automatics Laboratory (GIPSA-Lab). His research interests include image analysis, multicom-ponent image processing, nonlinear filtering, and data fusion in remote sensing.

Dr. Chanussot is the founding President of IEEE Geo-science and Remote Sensing French chapter (2007–2010) which received the 2010 IEEE GRSS Chapter Excellence Award. He was the co-recipient of the NORSIG 2006 Best Student Paper Award, the IEEE GRSS 2011 Symposium Prize Paper Award, the IEEE GRSS 2012 Transactions Prize Paper Award and the IEEE GRSS 2013 Highest Impact Paper Award. He was a member of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society AdCom (2009–2010), in charge of membership development. He was the General Chair of the first IEEE GRSS Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing, Evolution in Remote Sens-ing (WHISPERS). He was the Chair (2009–2011) and Co-chair of the GRS Data Fusion Technical Committee (2005–2008). He was a member of the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006–2008) and the Program Chair of the IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, (2009). He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (2005–2007) and for Pattern Recognition (2006–2008). Since 2007, he is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. Since 2011, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observa-tions and Remote Sensing.

Johannes R. Sveinsson received the B.S. degree from the University of Iceland, Reykjavk, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Queen‘s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, all in Electrical Engineering. He is currently the Head and Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Iceland. He was with the Labo-ratory of Information Technology and Signal Processing from 1981 to 1982 and, from November 1991 to 1998, with the Engineering Research Institute as a Senior Mem-ber of the research staff and a Lecturer at the Department

of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Ice-land. He was a Visiting Research Student with the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, U.K., from 1985 to 1986. At Queen‘s University, he held teaching and research assistantships. His current research interests are in systems and signal theory. Dr. Sveinsson received the Queens Graduate Awards from Queens University.

5. IEEE GRSS SymPoSIum PRIzE PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the Symposium Prize Paper Award to recognize the author(s) who presented at the IEEE Inter-national Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) an exceptional paper in terms of content and impact on the GRSS. In selecting the paper, other factors considered are originality, clarity and timeliness of the paper. The published versions of the papers in the Digest shall also be evaluated. Prize: Certificate and $1250, equally divided between the authors.

The 2013 Symposium Prize Paper Award is presented to Yi Cui, Yoshio Yamaguchi, Hirokazu Kobayashi, and Jian Yang with the citation: “For a very significant contribu-tion to the field of endeavor of the IEEE GRS Society in the paper entitled “Filtering of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Images: A Sequential Approach,” co-authored by Yi Cui, Yoshio Yamaguchi, Hirokazu Kobayashi, and Jian Yang, and presented at the 2012 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Sym-posium, July 2012, in Munich, IGARSS´12 Proceedings.”

Yi Cui (S’09–M’11) received the B.S. degree (with hon-ors) in electronic information science and technology from Jilin University, Changchun, China, in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in information and communication engi-neering from the Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2011. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Niigata University, Niigata, Japan. His research interests include SAR image processing, radar polarimetry, and elec-tromagnetic theory. Dr. Cui is the first-prize winner of the student paper competition at the 2010 Asia-Pacific Radio Science Conference (AP-RASC’10), and a recipient of the best paper award of the 2012 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP’2012).

FIGuRE 11. Symposium Prize Paper Award recipients Jian Yang (left), Yoshio Yamaguchi, and Yi Cui with Society President Melba Crawford.

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Yoshio Yamaguchi (M’83–SM’94–F’02) received the B.E. degree in electron-ics engineering from Niigata University in 1976, and the M.E. and Dr.Eng. Degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, in 1978 and 1983, respectively.

He joined the Faculty of Engineering, Niigata University in 1978. He is a Pro-fessor of Information Engineering, and Director of Main Library of the University. His interests are in the field of radar polar-imetry, microwave sensing and imaging. He received IEEE GRSS 2008 Education Award. He has served as Chair of IEEE GRSS Japan Chapter (2002–03), Vice Chair (2000–01), Chair of URSI-F Japan (06–12). He had been serving as an asso-ciate editor of GRSS Newsletter, and Paper Award Com-mittee member of IEEE GRS Society. He was a co-chair of the Technical Program Committee of IGARSS 2011. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Japan.

He has authored two books in Japanese, “Radar Polar-imetry from Basics to Applications” published by IEICE in 2007, and “Fundamentals of Polarimetric Radar and Its Applications”, published by Realize Inc. in 1998.

Hirokazu Kobayashi (M’87–SM’10) was born in Hok-kaido, Japan. He received the B.E.E. and M.E.E. degrees from the Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan, in 1978 and 1980, respectively, and received the Dr. Eng. degree from Tsukuba University, Tsukuba, Japan, in 2000.

He joined Fujitsu LTD., Kawasaki, Japan in 1980. Since 1981 he has been with the Fujitsu System Integration Lab-oratories as a Researcher for development of micro- and millimeter-wave wide-band antennas and passive devices, active phased array radar, and electromagnetic theoreti-cal investigation for scattering cross-sections. During 1999–2010, he served as a Director and General Manager of the Laboratories and Fujitsu LTD. In 2010 he joined the

Faculty of Engineering as a Professor in Niigata University, Niigata, Japan. His cur-rent research interests are high-frequency electromagnetic analysis for computing of radar cross section of large objects, near-field analysis and imaging using PO/PTD/GTD, and near-field RCS transformation to far-field based on microwave imaging theory such as SAR and Inverse SAR.

Dr. Kobayashi is a Senior member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Soci-ety, and a member of the Institute of Elec-tronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Japan. He was Adjunct Lecturer of Tsukuba University (2002–2004) and Tokyo Metropolitan University, Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology (2009–

2010) and recently he published a book, “Electromag-netic Wave in Space,” Press-Media, Niigata, Japan (2011, in Japanese).

Jian Yang (M’98–SM’02) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China, in 1985 and 1990, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Niigata University, Niigata, Japan, in 1999. In 1985, he was with the Department of Applied Mathemat-ics, Northwestern Polytechnical University. From 1999 to 2000, he was an Assistant Professor with Niigata Univer-sity. Since April 2000, he has been with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include radar polarimetry, remote sensing, math-ematical modeling, optimization in engineering, and fuzzy theory. Dr. Yang is the Chairman of the Institute of Electrical, Information, and Communication Engineers in Beijing and the Vice Chairman of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, Beijing chapter.

6. IEEE GRSS InTERacTIvE SESSIon PRIzE PaPER awaRdThe GRSS established the Interactive Session Prize Paper Award to recognize the author(s) who posted at the GRSS Symposium (IGARSS) an exceptional paper in terms of content and impact on the GRSS. When select-ing the paper, other factors considered are originality, clarity and timeliness of the paper. The published ver-sions of the papers in the Digest shall also be evaluated. Prize: Certificate and $1250, equally divided between the authors.

The 2013 Interactive Session Prize Paper Award is pre-sented to Spencer Farrar, Martín Labanda, María Marta Jacob, Sergio Masuelli, Sayak Biswas, Héctor Raimondo, and Linwood Jones with the citation: “For an exceptional paper posted in the Interactive Session of the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS’11 enti-tled “An Empirical Correction for the MWR Brightness Tem-perature Smear Effect,” co-authored by Spencer Farrar, Martín

FIGuRE 12. Symposium Prize Paper Award recipient Hirokazu Kobayashi.

FIGuRE 13. Interactive Session Prize Paper Award recipient W. Linwood Jones with Society President Melba Crawford.

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Labanda, María Marta Jacob, Sergio Masuelli, Sayak Biswas, Héctor Raimondo, and Linwood Jones, and presented at the 2012 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Sympo-sium, July 2012 in Munich, IGARSS´12 Proceedings.”

Spencer Farrar (S’07) received the B.S. & M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2008 & 2009 from the Univer-sity of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineer-ing at the University of Central Florida. Since 2008, he has been a Graduate Research Assistant with the Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory, University of Central Florida. His past research within the satellite remote sens-ing field has been analysis on rainfall products, simula-tion of MWR Geophysical retrievals, Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD) geophysical retrievals for 2010 GRIP flights. He has been involved in the GPM Intersat-ellite Calibration Working Group (X-CAL) performing satellite calibration on multiple satellites since Summer 2010. His current dissertation topic is Cold Sky Analysis of Spaceborne Microwave Radiometers.

Martín Labanda received his degree of Licenciate in Physics from the Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics (FaMAF), National University of Córdoba, Cór-doba, Argentina in 2011. From 2009, he has been work-ing at the Argentina Space Agency (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, CONAE) as member of the SAC‐D Calibration Group. Within the satellite remote sensing field, he has been performing research on‐flight sensor calibration methodologies and radiative transfer model-

ing especially in microwave radiometry. Currently, he is contributing to the calibration of the microwave radiom-eter (MWR) and the infrared camera (NIRST).

Maria Marta Jacob received the Licenciate degree in Physics from the Facultad of Matemática, Astronomía y Física at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argen-tina, in 2009. She is currently a Visitor Research Scholar at Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory (CFRSL) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL. In this position, she performs research in satellite microwave remote sensing, related to calibration and geophysical retrieval algorithm development from microwave radi-ometer data. Since 2009 she has been working at the Argentine Space Agency (Comisión Nacional de Activi-dades Espaciales, CONAE), where she contributed in the Flight Engineering Group of the SAC-D/ Aquarius Satel-lite and the Microwave Radiometer Inter-Satellite Radio-metric Calibration (X-Cal) Working Group.

Sergio Masuelli received the B.S. degree and the Ph.D. in Physics from the UNC (Córdoba National Univer-sity), in 1994 and 2000, respectively. Since 2009 he is a CONAE’s system engineer working in the development of geophysical applications for this sensor, in special L2 and L3 Sea Ice products. In parallel he is an Associated Profes-sor of the Master Program in Emergency Early Warning and Response Space Applications, at of the Gulich Insti-tute (CONAE, UNC, ASI); he teaches graduate courses in Modelling, SAR Applications, Numerical Analysis and Emergency Applications.

Spencer Farrar

Sergio Masuelli Sayak Biswas Héctor Raimondo

Martín Labanda María Marta Jacob

FIGuRE 14. Interactive Session Prize Paper Award recipients.

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From 1994 to 1998 he was a Ph.D. fellow in the Atmo-spheric Physics team of the Math, Astronomy and Physics faculty of the Córdoba National University. In his thesis he studied the role of electrical parameters in the cloud micro-physics and its influence in the cleaning of atmospheric pollutant, given contributions principally in numerical cloud modelling, electrification of clouds, and the collec-tion efficiency of charged droplets and aerosols by hydro-meteors under intense electric fields. From 1996 to 1998 he collaborated with the Air Quality Monitoring System of Córdoba city, developing a daily air pollution forecast.

From 1999 to 2005 he was an INVAP SA employee, working in the Teófilo Tabanera Space Center (CETT) of CONAE, as SAC-A mission operator, system production operator of satellite images, operation supervisor, support operation engineer. Additionally, he worked for the provi-sion of images for emergency and the Charter for major disasters. From 2005 to 2007 he was Associate Professor of the Technologic National University, Concepción del Uruguay, teaching undergraduate courses in Physics and Numerical Analysis, and doing research on image process-ing and hydrological modeling.

Sayak K. Biswas (S’08-M’12) received the B.Tech. degree in electronics and communication engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India, in 2005, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

He is currently a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow with the Earth Science Office at the Marshall Space Flight Cen-ter in Huntsville, Alabama. From 2008 to early 2012 he was with the Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory (CFRSL) at UCF, where he contributed in various research projects related to calibration of microwave radiometers and geo-physical retrieval algorithm development from microwave radiometer data. Prior to CFRSL, from 2005 to 2007 he worked as an Associate Systems Engineer at IBM India Private Limited in Pune, India.

Dr. Biswas is a recipient of the NASA Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Award for the proposal titled “Cali-bration and Image Reconstruction Algorithm Develop-ment for Hurricane Imaging Radiometer”.

Héctor Raimondo received B.S. degree of Engineer in Electronics and Electricity, awarded by the Universidad de Mendoza, Argentina in 1978. He is currently working at the Argentine Space Agency (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, CONAE) as Coordinator of the Ground Segment and Applications Engineering Group. He is responsible for the coordination of the working groups for the development of the software that will carry out the routine processing (radiometric and geometric calibration) of the data generated by CoNAE instruments on board the Argentine SAC-D/Aquarius satellite. Since 1992 he has been working in CONAE, involved in several projects, such as the specification and design of the image acquisi-tion software of the instruments MMRS & HTRC, both on

board of the SAC-C satellite. Prior to this, he collaborated in the Airborne Multispectral Scanner Project (AMS) of the Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones Espaciales (CNIE) & the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt Luft und Raumfahrt e.V (DFVLR—German Space Agency). Héctor Raimondo has also been a professor of the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional—Facultad Regional Mendoza, since 1983.

W. Linwood Jones (SM’75-F’99-LF09) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA in 1962, M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA in 1965, and the Ph.D. degree in elec-trical engineering from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1971.

He is currently a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. At UCF, he teaches under-graduate and graduate courses in RF/MW communica-tions, satellite remote sensing and radar systems. Also, he is the director of the Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory, where he performs research in satellite micro-wave remote sensing technology development. Prior to becoming a college professor in 1994, he had 27 years fed-eral government employment with NASA at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA; at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC and at the Kennedy Space Center, FL. Further, he spent 8 years in the private aerospace industry with employment at General Electric’s Space Division in King of Prussia, PA and Harris Corp.’s Govt. Aerospace Systems Division in Melbourne, FL.

Prof. Jones is a Life Fellow of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, Antennas and Propagation Soci-ety, and Oceanic Engineering Society; and a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Commission F of the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale. For excel-lence in education, he received the IEEE Orlando Section: Outstanding Engineering Educator Award 2003, the Col-lege of Engineering: Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award 2004, the IEEE Florida Council: Outstanding Engi-neering Educator Award 2004 and the University of Central Fl Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award 2011. For his research, he received four NASA Special Achievement Awards, eight NASA Group Achievement Awards, the CNES Space Medal, the Aviation Week & Space Technology Space Program Award—1993, and the Naval Research Lab 2004 Alan Berman Research Publications Award.

7. STudEnT PRIzE PaPER awaRdSA total of three prizes are presented including two GRSS Student Prize Paper Awards (third and second prize) and the IEEE Mikio Takagi Student Prize (first prize).

7.1. GRSS Student PRize PaPeR awaRdSThe GRSS Student Prize Paper Award was established to recognize the best student papers presented at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing

DECEMBER 2013 ieee Geoscience and remote sensinG maGazine 41

Symposium (IGARSS). It is believed that early recogni-tion of an outstanding paper will encourage the student to strive for greater and continued contributions to the Geoscience and Remote Sensing profession. The award shall be considered annually.

Ten high-quality papers were preselected by the Stu-dent Prize Paper Awards Committee in cooperation with the Technical Program Committee. At IGARSS 2013 in Melbourne, the students presented their papers in a spe-cial session and a jury, nominated by the GRSS Awards Co-Chair, evaluated and ranked them for the awards.

The Third Prize is presented to Ruzbeh Akbar with the citation: “For the paper “A Radar-Radiometer Surface Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm for SMAP.” His advisor is Mahta Moghaddam from the University of Southern California.

Ruzbeh Akbar was born in High Wycombe, United Kingdom, and attended Montgomery Community Col-lege in Rockville MD, USA, in 2003. He then received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washing-ton University, in Washington DC, in 2009. He joined the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2009 and received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering in December 2011 from UM’s Radiation Laboratory.

Following his research groups transition to University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in January 2012, Ruzbeh followed suite and is currently finishing his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering. His primary research interests are forward and inverse Electromagnetic model-ing for remote sensing applications, especially soil mois-ture remote sensing. His current focus is development of radar-radiometer forward and inverse methods for soil moisture remote sensing. This work is directly related to NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive, SMAP, mission scheduled to launch late 2014. His other research interests include in situ vegetation (trees, crops, etc.) dielectric mea-surements and measurement techniques, electromagnetic scattering models for trees, microwave emission model-ing for forested areas. He has also regularly participated in many multi-scale field campaigns, from ground truth collection (CanEx’10 & SMAPVEx’12) to wireless sensor node deployment (SoilSCAPE) and radar measurements (AirMOSS). Ruzbeh is a member of IEEE, IEEE-GRSS and AGU. He is also a recipient of NASA’s Earth and Space Sci-ence Fellowship, NESSF, from 2010 till present (2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13).

The Second Student Prize Paper Award is presented to Octavio Ponce with the citation: “For the paper “Semisuper-vised Nonlinear Feature Extraction for Image Classification.” His advisor is Andreas Reigber from the Karlsruhe Insti-tute of Technology.

Octavio Ponce (S’12) was born in Mexico, in 1985. He received the Engineer’s degree (with honors) in telematics engineering from Mexico Autonomous Institute of Tech-nology (ITAM), Mexico, in 2009. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the Microwaves and Radar Institute, German Aerospace Cen-

ter (DLR), Wessling, Germany. In 2009, he was with the Astrium, European Aeronautic Defense and Space Com-pany (EADS) GmbH, Germany, designing a high-speed video interface unit for the Fluid Science Laboratory, Columbus Module, International Space Station. In 2007, he was with the Defense and Security, EADS GmbH, Ger-many, developing software for interpretation and analysis of security system onboard aircraft, i.e., black boxes. His research interests include 3-D high-resolution SAR imag-ing, new SAR imaging modes, radar signal processing, and future Earth observation space missions.

7.2. 2013 ieee Mikio takaGi Student PRizeThe IEEE Mikio Takagi Student Prize was established to recognize a student who has presented an exceptional paper at the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Sym-posium (IGARSS).

The 2013 IEEE Mikio Takagi Student Prize is presented to Pedram Ghamisi with the citation: “For the paper “The Spec-tral Spatial Classification of Hyperspectral Images Based on Hid-den Markov Random Field and Its Expectation-Maximization.”

FIGuRE 16. Student Prize Paper Award recipient Octavio Ponce with Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 15. Student Prize Paper Award recipient Ruzbeh Akbar with Society President Melba Crawford.

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His advisor is Jon Atli Benediktsson from the University of Iceland.

Pedram Ghamisi (S’13) received the B.Sc. degree in civil (survey) engineering from Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran, and the M.Sc. degree in remote sensing from K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, in 2012. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Iceland,

Reykjavik, Iceland. His research interests are remote sensing and image analysis with the current focus on spectral and spatial techniques for hyperspectral image classification. He received the Best Researcher Award for M.Sc. students from K. N. Toosi University of Technology in 2010–2011. He serves as a reviewer for a number of journals including the IEEE Transactions on Image Process-ing, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observa-tions and Remote Sensing, and IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

8. cERTIFIcaTES oF REcoGnITIonIn the past Certificates of Recognition have been in most cases presented to persons, who have provided continuous contributions and leadership to the GRSS Administrative Committee and the GRS Society. At IGARSS 2013 three Cer-tificates of Recognition were presented for technical merits.

A Certificate of Recognition is presented to Elena Daganzo Eusebio, Roger Oliva, Sara Nieto, and Philippe Richaume with the citation: “For their successful efforts in working with national authorities in removing radio-fre-quency interference sources from the protected 1400–1427 MHz EESS band.”

Elena Daganzo Eusebio received the M.Sc. degree in telecommunication engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain in 1988. In 1992 she joined the European Space Agency (ESA) at its Operations Cen-ter in Darmstadt, Germany, as a Ground Segment Systems Engineer. She was involved in the preparation of the ESA ground segment network to support the launch and opera-tions of several space missions. Since 1996, she has worked at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESA/ESTEC), first as a TT&C and RF System Engineer and then, since 2009, as the Frequency Management Engineer in the Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes. She analyzes the spectrum requirements for future Earth obser-vation missions; addresses interference issues and monitors the evolution of the frequency needs for future missions. She participates in numerous technical committees within the ITU, CEPT, and SFCG. She liaises with National Fre-quency Management Administrations in order to improve the RF interference environment encountered by ESA’s Earth Observation missions, in particular on the Soil Mois-

ture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) spacecraft. Roger Oliva received the M.S degree in

telecommunication engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain; and the M.S. degree in Astronomy (D.E.A) from the Barcelona University, Spain. He has been working in several space and astronomy projects, including Mars Express, astronomi-cal microwave observatories and in the design of advanced telecommunications satellite pay-loads. Since 2007 he is working as a Calibra-tion Engineer for the European Space Agency, on the Earth Observation satellite SMOS.

FIGuRE 17. Recipient of the IEEE Mikio Takagi Student Prize Pedram Ghamisi with Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 18. Roger Oliva received the Certificate of Recognition from Society President Melba Crawford.

FIGuRE 19. Certificate of Recognition recipients from left: Elena Daganzo Eusebio, Sara Nieto, and Philippe Richaume.

DECEMBER 2013 ieee Geoscience and remote sensinG maGazine 43

Sara Nieto received the B.S. degree in computer science, specializing in informa-tion systems development and artificial intelligence from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. She has been a part of the SMOS Operations Team, Euro-pean Space Astronomy Centre, Madrid, since April 2010, where she provides support on radio frequency interference detection.

Philippe Richaume received the engi-neer degree in computer, electronic, and automatic from the Ecole Supérieure d’Informatique, Electronique et Automa-tique, Paris, France, in 1990, the M.Sc. degree in computer sciences and artificial intelligence from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France, in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree in com-puter sciences and applied mathematics from CNAM, Paris, 1996. For the last 20 years, he has worked in vari-ous geophysical laboratories, putting to stress advanced computer science and applied mathematics paradigms against real problems, particularly in the remote sens-ing context. He is working currently with the Centre d’Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphère (CESBIO), Toulouse, France. His domains of interest are signal processing, nonlinear modeling and inverse problem, particularly using artificial neural networks such as for real-time signal processing controller of a radio receiver dedicated to solar wind plasma line tracking onboard the WIND/WAVES spacecraft, or for direct-inverse modeling of ocean surface wind from ERS 1/2 scatterometer or bio-physical parameters, LAI, chlorophyll, etc., from POL-DER optical directional reflectance, or using traditional iterative minimization approaches like for soil moisture retrieval from SMOS brightness temperature he is work-ing on currently.

9. conGRaTuLaTIonS To aLL 2013 awaRd REcIPIEnTSThe GRSS Awards Committee would like to thank the evaluators of IGARSS’13 technical sessions and the Edito-

rial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, and the GRSS Student Prize Paper Awards Committee for their valuable inputs to the awards pro-cess. We would also like to encourage all GRSS members to actively participate in nominating distinguished col-leagues for the GRSS Major Awards including the Dis-tinguished Achievement Award, the Outstanding Ser-vice Award and the Education Award. GRSS members can nominate papers also for journal awards. Please see instructions on the GRSS Home Page.

10. BEST wISHES FoR a SuccESSFuL IGaRSS 2014The General Co-Chairs of IGARSS 2013 Simon Jones and Peter Woodgate turned over the responsibility for the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium to IGARSS 2014 General Chair Monique Ber-nier, with their best wishes for a successful symposium in Quebec City, July 13–18, 2014. The symposium will be held in conjunction with the 35th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing and the theme is “Energy and Our Changing Planet”. Please visit http://igarss2014.com/Wel-come.asp for further information.

We hope to see you in Quebec City at IGARSS 2014!

FIGuRE 21. IGARSS’14 organizer Monique Bernier received the best wishes and some supplies for a successful symposium from IGARSS’13 organizers Simon Jones (left) and Peter Woodgate (right).

FIGuRE 20. All award recipients and involved GRSS and IEEE officials, from left: Jian Yang, Yi Cui, Yoshio Yamaguchi, Gustavo Camps-Valls, Luis Gómez-Chova, GRSS Publications Awards Chair Martti Hallikainen, Jocelyn Chanussot, Jon Atli Benediktsson, Pedram Ghamisi, IEEE President Peter Staecker, GRSS President Melba Crawford, Thomas Meissner, Frank J. Wentz, W. Linwood Jones, Salman Saeed Khan, Roger Oliva, Ruzbeh Akbar, and Octavio Ponce.