Web-Talk on Urban Climate Change Responses: What is the Role of Geomatics?

Dr. Hendrik Herold is senior scientist in the land-use monitoring research group of the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) in Dresden, Germany. An expert in spatiotemporal data analysis and modeling, he conducts research in the fields of image analysis using high-performance computing and uncertainty handling in the context of long-term geospatial monitoring and modeling. The fields of applications range from settlement structure detection, ex-post impact assessment, ecosystem services to real-time sensor-based urban monitoring. Before launching his academic career, he studied geography, geology and meteorology with a special focus on geoinformatics, including a period of study at Ohio State University in Columbus (USA). In 2015 he was awarded a doctoral degree in geoinformatics by the TU Dresden, Germany.

Dr. Umamaheshwaran Rajasekar is chair of the Urban Resilience Unit and Heading the Climate Centre for Cities (C-Cube) at National Institute of Urban Affairs, India. He has over 17 years of experience in developing risk reduction strategies, climate change analysis, institutional strengthening for governments, INGOs and multi-lateral agencies. His recent efforts have been towards bridging the technology and communication gap to enable informed decision making. He has been the team leader and project manager for some of the pioneering risk resilience efforts in India including implementation of early warning systems, urban disease surveillance and city resilience strategies.

Dr. Sanjay Ghosh is a professor at IIT Roorkee, specialised in geomatics engineering. He did his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Univeristy of Roorkee, now IIT Roorkee and received a Ph.D. from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 1991 with Prof. George Flemingunder Commonwealth Scholarship, United Kingdom. His present research domains are biodiversity, watershed and water security, river morphology, agriculture crop identification, urban change assessment and climatic changes and developing remote sensing algorithms for machine learning and deep learning. Presently, he is the head of Civil Engineering Department, established in 1847, at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. He serves on various national committees related to Smart Cities, Spatial Data Initiative of Resource. He published 97 journal articles and guided 23 Ph.D. and 73 Master’s theses.

Dr. Robert Hecht is a senior scientist at the IOER with expertise in the fields of geoinformatics, cartography and applied remote sensing. He received his PhD degree from the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Dresden University of Technology Dresden on developing approaches for automatic building classification and urban structure type recognition. His current research focuses on spatiotemporal analysis, monitoring and geovisualization of settlements and open spaces, which also includes vegetation mapping, building stock analysis, and population mapping. His general interests include geospatial pattern recognition, machine learning/AI and big data applications, quality aspects of spatial data, VGI and crowdsourcing, and developing location-based services in an urban context.

Prof. Dr. Marc Wolfram is the Director of the IOER and full professor of spatial development and transformation at Technische Universität Dresden. He has an interdisciplinary academic background and extensive experience as a consultant and senior investigator in Europe (2002-2012), doing collaborative research on diverse urban sustainability issues together with stakeholders at all levels. He also worked as an associate professor in South Korea (2013-2019), pioneering research on transformative urban change dynamics, and advising global city networks, UN bodies and funding agencies. His work has been published widely in leading journals. Marc Wolfram is also co-founder and editor-in-chief of the open access journal Urban Transformations, and a board member of the International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS),