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Welcome at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Opening of the School

Welcome at the University of Santiago de Compostela and opening of the school .

Meet

Instructor

Professor Dora Blanco Heras, University Santiago de Compostella

Dora Blanco Heras

Biography

Dora B. Heras is a full professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She received a MS in Physics in 1993 and was awarded a PhD cum laude from this university. In the period from 2005 to 2010 she was appointed as the head of the Sustainable Development Office at this university. Since 2008 she is also with the research centre CiTIUS (Centro de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes) where she leads the hyperspectral remote sensing computing line and has received the accreditation as full professor in 2020. He is also co-chair of the High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing (HDCRS) Working Group of the IEEE GRSS ESI Technical Committee.

Her research contributions cover a range of topics in the combined fields of image processing, remote sensing, machine learning and high performance computing. In particular, in the last ten years her research has been framed in the line of high performance computing and its application to remote sensing. She has participated in research projects funded by Spanish and European institutions, and R&D agreements.  She has served as program committee, guest editor and reviewer in several conferences, in particular, the Euromicro 2021 Parallel and Distributed Conference, and serves as reviewer for different top-ranked journals. She is also a member of the Euro-Par conference Steering Committee since 2018 and has acted as co-chair of the co-located workshops for all the editions since 2017.

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CESGA: High Performance and Disruptive Computing

The contribution of the Galician Supercomputing Centre to the infrastructures and research on High Performance and Disruptive Computing will be presented

Meet

Instructor

Lois Orosa

Biography

Lois Orosa defended his PhD. in the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2013. He received the distinction of “Cum Laude” for the quality of his PhD thesis, and he has been doing research on Computer Architecture since then.

Lois Orosa is currently the Director of the Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA) since March 2022, which currently has 51 people. As part of the responsibilities assumed at CESGA, Lois Orosa is leading the Galicia Quantum Technology Hub (or “ Polo de Tecnoloxías Cuánticas de Galicia ”). The Hub strategy plan foresees an investment of 154M euros until 2030, from which around 30M were already executed.

Before joining CESGA, he was doing research at ETH Zürich for 4 years in the SAFARI Research group, lead by Onur Mutlu. Before that, he received a research grant to work on Computer Architecture for 3 years in the University of Campinas, where he co-advise a PhD student. He also has been doing other research stays on top International Institutions, both in Industry, in the companies IBM R&D (Haifa, Israel), Xilinx (Dublin, Ireland), Recore Systems (Enschede, Netherlands), and Academia, in Universidade de Illinois en Urbana-Champaign (USA), Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal).

He has contributed very significantly to the field of Computer Architecture in the last few years, making very relevant contributions especially in reliability and security of computer systems. He published in the 4 top venues in this area in the last few years: 4 papers in ISCA, 5 papers in HPCA, 7 papers in MICRO, and 3 papers in ASPLOS, from which he received 19 HiPEAC awards , given to European researchers that publish in strong venues .

He also published 7 additional papers on top venues and journals (Q1 equivalent). The impact of these publications is significant in recent years (470 citations in the year 2023, 1512 citations in total). He also has presented several posters and short papers, and has given multiple talks about his research. He serviced the community by being a reviewer and a program committee member of many conferences, journals and workshops.

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IEEE GRSS and Activities of HDCRS Working Group

The IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) focuses on advancing the science and technology of remote sensing and disseminating knowledge in this field. The society supports various technical committees and working groups that promote research, development, and education in geoscience and remote sensing. One such group is the “High-performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing” (HDCRS) of the GRSS Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee (ESI TC). HDCRS is the main organizer of this school, and its primary objective is to connect a community of interdisciplinary researchers in remote sensing who specialize in distributed computing (such as supercomputing and cloud computing), disruptive computing (e.g., quantum computing), and parallel programming models with specialized hardware (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs). The activities of HDCRS include educational events, special sessions, and tutorials at conferences, as well as publication activities, which will be presented

Meet

Instructor

Dr Gabriele Cavallaro, PhD. Deputy head high productivity data processing, Juelich Supercomputing Center

Gabriele Cavallaro

Biography

Gabriele Cavallaro (Senior Member, IEEE) received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2011 and 2013, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iceland, Iceland, in 2016. From 2016 to 2021, he served as the deputy head of the "High Productivity Data Processing" (HPDP) research group at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Since 2022, he has been the Head of the "AI and ML for Remote Sensing" Simulation and Data Lab at JSC and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Iceland, Iceland. From 2020 to 2023, he held the position of Chair for the High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing (HDCRS) Working Group under the IEEE GRSS Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee (ESI TC). In 2023, he took on the role of Co-chair for the ESI TC. Concurrently, he serves as Visiting Professor at the Φ-Lab within the European Space Agency (ESA), where he contributes to the Quantum Computing for Earth Observation (QC4EO) initiative. Additionally, he has been serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) since October 2022.

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Quantum Computing for Earth Observation (QC4EO): Advances and Challenges in Generative AI and Quantum Neural Networks

Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, bringing the prospect of a new computing paradigm closer to reality. As the race to find practical use cases intensifies, Earth observation has emerged as a promising area, with several prototypes already developed and tested. In this discussion, we will explore some of the latest developments in the field of Quantum Computing for Earth Observation (QC4EO) and highlight the current challenges. Specifically, we will focus on Quantum Generative Artificial Intelligence, including Quantum Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, as well as optimization of Quantum Neural Networks for various Earth observation use cases related to climate change and energy efficiency.

Meet

Instructor

Betrand Le Saux

Biography

Bertrand Le Saux (Ms. Eng. 1999, MSc. 1999 INP Grenoble, PhD 2003 Univ. Versailles / Inria, Dr. Habil. 2019 Univ. Paris-Saclay) is a research scientist who designs data-driven techniques for visual understanding, in particular for our planet: AI for Earth, for short. He’s interested in tackling practical problems that arise in Earth Sciences and Climate, to bring solutions to current environmental and societal challenges. He has been with the Φ-lab at ESA/ESRIN and the Image-Vision-Learning team at ONERA, and made research stays at CNR/ISTI Pisa (IT), Univ. of Bern (CH), and ENS Cachan (FR). He was co-chair [2015-2017] and chair [2017-2019] for the IEEE GRSS technical committee on image analysis and data fusion (IADF TC). He is currently an associate editor of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. He is also a co-organiser of the CVPR / EarthVision workshop series.

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Google Earth Engine for Earth Observation

Google Earth Engine (GEE) is a cloud-based platform that democratizes access to Google's computational capabilities, allowing for planetary-scale geospatial data analysis to address critical societal issues. Unlike other platforms, it is an integrated tool that is not only accessible to remote sensing scientists but also to a broader audience, who may lack the technical expertise to utilize traditional supercomputers or large-scale cloud computing resources. In this session, we will cover the basics of using GEE for Earth observation and data processing. You will learn how to work with GEE's multi-petabyte analysis-ready data catalog and understand the peculiarities and logic of using the platform properly. During the hands-on sessions, you will get practical experience in utilizing GEE's powerful machine-learning capabilities for classification and regression tasks. Additionally, we will show you how to import and export your own data and provide examples of how you can share your results with broader audiences using GEE's shareable user interfaces.

Meet

Instructor

Alvaro Moreno Martínez

Biography

Alvaro Moreno-Martínez earned a Ph.D. degree in Physics (2014, summa cum laude) from the University of València, and he is currently a Senior Researcher at the Image Signal Processing Group (ISP) at the same university.  Dr. Moreno is a Google Developer Expert (GDE), and his research has been mainly focused on the development of physical and advanced machine learning models and the implementation of operational methodologies for the study of vegetation cover through satellite imagery at different spatial/temporal scales. He has published 44 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, 3 book chapters, and more than 80 international conference presentations. Dr. Moreno is an external professor of the Master of Remote Sensing and the Data Science degree, both at the University of Valencia, and he has participated in 12 projects (7 national, 5 international), and member of the European Geosciences Union, IEEE, and the American Geophysical Union.

Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier

Biography

Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier (Ph.D., 2014, University of Valencia) is an Assistant PostDoc in the Institute of Geomatics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU, Vienna). Dr. Izquierdo-Verdiguier is a Google Developer Expert from 2022, and her research interests are focused on the use of Earth Observation data and cloud computing environment for land surface phenology. Her previous research focused on machine learning applied to remote sensing data. In particular, nonlinear feature extraction based on kernel methods, and on automatic object identification and classification using multispectral images. She is also an external professor of the Master of Remote Sensing at the University of Valencia. In 2012, her paper was ranked second in the student’s competition of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS).