Professor Jeffrey Walker

Monash University, Australia

Bio: Jeffrey Walker is an Australian Research Council Laureate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University. He is undertaking research on soil moisture remote sensing and data assimilation, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. He is contributing to soil moisture satellite missions at both NASA and ESA, as a Science Definition Team member for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and Cal/val Team member for the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission respectively.

Professor Jeffrey Walker received his BEng(Civil) and BSurv degrees in 1996 with Hons 1 and University Medal from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and received his PhD in Water Resources Engineering from the same University in 2000. His PhD thesis was among the early pioneering research on estimation of root-zone soil moisture from remotely sensed surface soil moisture observations. He then joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre to implement his soil moisture work globally. In 2001 he moved to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Melbourne as Lecturer, where he continued his soil moisture work, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. In 2010 he was appointed as Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University where he is continuing this research.

His primary research ambition is to lead programs in socially relevant research that will have a positive impact on the way we take care of the environment so as to result in an improved quality of life both now and in the generations to come. He believes that the key to this is through improved earth system state and flux monitoring, prediction and reporting, in a way that is relevant to policy and decision making processes, flood and drought prediction and assessment, land and water management, national weather and climate forecasting, etc. His vision is that this goal will be realised through a combination of i) environmental sensing, ii) earth system modelling, and iii) optimal convergence of model predictions with observations through data assimilation. This is a new area of research that has gained wide spread interest over the past years.

Professor Jie Chen

Central South University, China

Bio:Jie Chen, Ph.D., is a professor, doctoral supervisor, and secretary of the Party branch for the Department of Geographic Information at the School of Geospatial Information. His focus research is the intelligent discovery of geographic knowledge driven by remote sensing big data. He has been recognized as a Youth Scientist in Global Cutting-Edge Technology by the World Geospatial Developers Conference (WGDC) and an Innovative Figure in GIS. Besides, he has received multiple awards, including one Second Prize for Technological Progress in Natural Resources, three Second Prizes for Technological Progress in Geographic Information Science, one First Prize for Technological Progress in Geographic Information Science in Hunan Province, and one Second Prize in Surveying Science and Technology in Hunan Province. He has also won two “Excellent Teaching Achievement” awards at the GIS Forum. Prof. Chen is a member of IEEE, CCF, and CSIG, and serves as a committee member for the Intelligent Surveying Working Committee of the Chinese Society for Geodesy Photogrammetry and Cartography, a committee member of the Remote Sensing Image Committee of the China Society of Image and Graphics, and a youth committee member of the Hunan Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has been honored as an excellent editorial board member for the journal Remote Sensing and serves as a reviewer for several authoritative and important academic journals both domestically and internationally, such as the ISPRS Journal, Science Advances, IEEE TGRS, IEEE JSTARS, JAG, GIScience & Remote Sensing, Transactions in GIS, National Remote Sensing Bulletin, Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica, Geomatics and Information Science of Wuhan University, and Journal of Hunan University(Natural Sciences).

Associate Professor Manoj Khandelwal

Federation University Australia

Bio: Dr Manoj Khandelwal is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate and Postgraduate Program Coordinator of mining engineering at Federation University Australia and is an Australian Endeavour Fellow. Before joining Federation University Australia, Dr Khandelwal worked as an Assistant Professor of mining engineering at Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture & Technology, India. Dr Khandelwal was a postdoctoral researcher at Monash University, Australia and a Senior Research Fellow at the Central Institute of Mining & Fuel Research, Dhanbad, India. Dr Khandelwal has more than twenty years of research and teaching experience in Australia and India. Dr Khandelwal has been recognized as a leading expert in mining geomechanics and rock blasting.