Speakers
Josef Aschbacher
European Space Agency
Josef Aschbacher is the ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes and Head of ESRIN, ESA’s centre for Earth Observation, located in Frascati (near Rome), Italy. Born in Austria, he studied at the University of Innsbruck, graduating with a Master and a Doctoral Degree in Natural Sciences. His professional career in ESA began in 1990 as a Young Graduate at ESA ESRIN. From 1991-93 he was seconded as ESA Representative to Southeast Asia to the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. From 1994 - 2001 he worked at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, where he was the Scientific Assistant to the Director of the Space Applications Institute. He returned to ESA HQ (Paris) in 2001 as Programme Coordinator where he was primarily responsible for advancing Copernicus activities within ESA. In 2006 he was nominated Head of the Copernicus Space Office, where he led all activities for Copernicus within the Agency and with external partners, in particular the European Commission. In 2014, he was promoted to Head of Programme Planning and Coordination at ESRIN, where he was responsible for planning ESA’s Earth Observation programmes and for formulating and implementing programmatic and strategic decisions across the Directorate. He took up duty as Director of Earth Observation Programmes on 1 July 2016.
Christina Gould
Thought for Food
Christine has dedicated her career to making ag innovation more open and collaborative. She created Thought For Food to inspire young people to get involved in developing the solutions their future depends on. Christine holds an MPA in Science & Technology Policy from Columbia University. She sits on the Board of Young Professionals in Ag Development and is a Founding Member of the Ashoka Changemakers League of Intrapreneurs.
Stockholm resident Carina Ahlqvist is one of the most experienced female 8000 m mountain climbers in Sweden. She climbed her first mountain, Mount Kenya Point Lenana 5985 meters, 20 years of age. Today, she has been to five 8000 meters mountain expeditions in the Himalayas. She collaborates with the European Space Agency, NASA, universities in US and Europé and the Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation collecting samples from the face of the mountain to complement satellite images and contribute to research in climate change. She has 20 years of experience as Senior Project Manager, consultant and Unit Manager, Sustainability Coordinator. Her passion is to climb and inspire people to care about planet Earth.
Max Craglia
JRC
Max is a lead scientist at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Digital Economy Unit, responsible for projects addressing the evolution of the space data economy and the geospatial sector, and new forms of governance in digitally-transformed societies He was the lead editor of the JRC policy report on Artificial Intelligence. Max has a bachelor degree in civil engineering from the Politecnico of Milan, and a Masters and a PhD in urban and regional planning from the universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield, respectively. He has published extensively on socio-economic impacts and applications of geographic information systems and science.
CS
Sébastien Dorgan has been working for 15 years in the development of satellite ground telecommunications and Earth Observation systems. During this experience, I acquired a high level of expertise in the design and operation of high-performance distributed systems, the processing and analysis of satellite data (geometric and radiometric corrections, stereo reconstruction, calibration and scientific exploitation).
As Technical Director of the CS Space Business Unit, he is in charge of:- products roadmaps (Control, Processing, Mission, scientific exploitation and Geo intelligence centers)
- identification of innovation axes,
- technical design, cost estimation, planning and risk analysis and mitigation of bidding responses,
- coordination of the technical teams and the respect of deadlines,
- marketing and sales support.
- RUS program (https://rus-copernicus.eu/portal/), a Copernicus data exploitation PaaS founded by the European Commission and managed by European Space Agency,
- multi cloud management solution SafeScale (https://github.com/CS-SI/SafeScale),
- future cloud processing center of the forthcoming CNES CO3D mission (https://spacewatch.global/2019/03/frances-cnes-gives-go-ahead-to-co3d-earth-observation-programme/),
- future cloud processing center of Sentinel 1 mission for Airbus Defence and Space (https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1).
- future cloud processing center of Sentinel 2 mission for Thales Alenia Space (https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1).
- designed the EarthSignature project, an agricultural parcel classification system based on the combined use of multi-spectral and radar satellite images using a hybrid combinatorial optimization and Deep Learning approach. This system was presented at the Living Planet Symposium 2019 (https://lps19.esa.int/NikalWebsitePortal/living-planet-symposium-2019/lps19/Agenda/AgendaItemDetail?id=54692f7d-7c3b-499d-bbb2-16f3ae5bdda9),
- designed and built, on behalf of EUMETSAT, the proof of concept of a system for the scientific exploitation of meteorological data (https://github.com/sdorgancs/egpt).
Julien Cornebise
Element Ai
Julien is a Director of Research at Element AI and Head of the London Office and AI for Good team there. He is also an Honorary Researcher at University College London. Prior to Element AI, Julien joined DeepMind (later acquired by Google) in 2012 as an early employee. During his four years at DeepMind, he led several fundamental research directions used in early demos and fundraising, he helped create and lead its Health Applied Research Team. Since leaving DeepMind in 2016, he has been working with Amnesty International. Julien holds an MSc in Computer Engineering, an MSc in Mathematical Statistics, and earned his PhD in Mathematics, specialised in Computational Statistics, from University Paris VI Pierre and Marie Curie, for which he received the 2010 Savage Award in Theory and Methods from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis..
Begum Demir
TU Berlin
Begüm is a Professor and head of the Remote Sensing Image Analysis (RSiM) group at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her main research interests include image processing and machine learning with applications to remote sensing image analysis. She is the principle investigator of the “BigEarth-Accurate and Scalable Processing of Big Data in Earth Observation” project supported by the European Research Council. Through the BigEarth project, her team has recently developed and made public one of the largest Sentinel-2 benchmark archive (BigEarthNet) to drive the deep learning studies in remote sensing. She has been the recipient of the 2018 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Early Career Award.
Gemma Milne
Science: Disrupt
Gemma is a Science & Technology Writer covering all things deep tech, including biotech, advanced computing, space, energy and innovation in academia, for titles such as Forbes, the BBC, CNBC, the Guardian, and Quartz. She is also Co-Host of Science: Disrupt – a podcast interviewing the innovators, iconoclasts & entrepreneurs creating change in science. As a deep tech consultant, she is an Expert Advisor for the European Commission and Innovate UK, and a Scout for Backed VC. Gemma is an Innovation Jury Member for SXSW and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and she is currently writing her first book on hype and idealism in science and tech.
Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
I started working on climate variability at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in 1992, where I did my PhD. I then worked as a postdoc in Météofrance (Toulouse, France), at the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial (Torrejón, Spain) and for ten years at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Reading, UK). I led the Climate Forecast Unit at the Institut Català de Ciències del Clima (IC3) from 2010 to 2015. I am currently the head of the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). The Department hosts more than 70 engineers, physicists, mathematicians and social scientists who try to bring the latest developments in supercomputing and data analysis to provide the best information and services on climate and air quality. I am author of more than 130 peer-reviewed papers (h index 36, scopus), member of several international scientific committees and supervisor of several postdocs, engineers and two PhD students.
Miguel Mahecha
Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
Current research Interests:
Climate extremes and ecosystem functioning:
-How do ecosystems reespond to hydometeorological extremes
-Detection and attribution of extremes in in-situ and Earth observations
Intrinsic functioning of terrestrial ecosystems:
-Empirical description of cross relationships in biogeochemcial fluxes (FLUXNET)
-Quantifying unconfounded sensitivities of ecosystem fluxes
-Performance evaluation of land surface models
Biogeography and ecosystem functioning:
-Value of macroecological approaches in the analysis of ecosystem functioning (incl. trait data, functional diversity)
-Role of plant traits and functional diversity in biogeochemical cycles
Methodological aspects:
-Time series analysis: spatiotemporal environmental data
-Nonlinear dimensionality reduction (e.g. for vegetation data, remote sensing data)
-Extrapolation (e.g. upscaling plant traits for Europe)
Climate extremes and ecosystem functioning:
-How do ecosystems reespond to hydometeorological extremes
-Detection and attribution of extremes in in-situ and Earth observations
Intrinsic functioning of terrestrial ecosystems:
-Empirical description of cross relationships in biogeochemcial fluxes (FLUXNET)
-Quantifying unconfounded sensitivities of ecosystem fluxes
-Performance evaluation of land surface models
Biogeography and ecosystem functioning:
-Value of macroecological approaches in the analysis of ecosystem functioning (incl. trait data, functional diversity)
-Role of plant traits and functional diversity in biogeochemical cycles
Methodological aspects:
-Time series analysis: spatiotemporal environmental data
-Nonlinear dimensionality reduction (e.g. for vegetation data, remote sensing data)
-Extrapolation (e.g. upscaling plant traits for Europe)
Marco Trombetti
Pi-campus
Marco is a computer scientist, s erial entrepreneur and investor. In 1999, together with his wife Isabelle Andrieu, he co-founded Translated, a translation service that pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to help professional translators. Today, Translated is one of the most successful online translation companies in the world. In 2016, the company was named among the top 50 European fastest growing tech companies by Tech Tour. In 2007, he co-founded Memopal, a cloud storage company, with Gianluca Granero. With the profits from these ventures, Marco, Isabelle and Gianluca co-founded Pi Campus, a venture capital firm that invests in growth-stage technology startups, mostly in the AI field, with more than 40 investments from Europe and US in its portfolio. Some of the companies funded by Pi Campus are based in a startup district located in Rome, where villas have been converted into offices to provide the best work environment for talented people.
Danielle Wood
Space Enabled Research Group
Professor Danielle Wood serves as an Assistant Professor in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences within the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within the Media Lab, Prof. Wood leads the Space Enabled Research Group which seeks to advance justice in earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space. Prof. Wood is a scholar of societal development with a background that includes satellite design, earth science applications, systems engineering, and technology policy. In her research, Prof. Wood applies these skills to design innovative systems that harness space technology to address development challenges around the world. Prior to serving as faculty at MIT, Prof. Wood held positions at NASA Headquarters, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Aerospace Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, and the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. Prof. Wood studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a PhD in engineering systems, SM in aeronautics and astronautics, SM in technology policy, and SB in aerospace engineering.
Florence Rabier
ECMWF
Florence has been Director-General of ECMWF since January 2016, after two years leading the Centre’s Forecast Department. Her career so far has taken her back and forth between Météo-France and ECMWF. Florence is an internationally recognised expert in Numerical Weather Prediction, whose leadership has greatly contributed to delivering major operational changes at both ECMWF and Météo-France. She is especially well known within the meteorological community for her key role in implementing an innovative data assimilation method (4D-Var) in 1997, which was a first worldwide and contributed to an optimal use of satellite observations in weather forecasting. She also led an international experiment involving a major field campaign over Antarctica, in the context of the International Polar Year and the WMO THORPEX programme.
Alison Lowndes
NVIDIA
Artificial Intelligence DevRel | EMEA
Joining in 2015, Alison spent her first 18 months with NVIDIA as a Deep Learning Solutions Architect and is now responsible for NVIDIA's Artificial Intelligence Developer Relations across the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa). She is a mature graduate in Artificial Intelligence combining technical and theoretical computer science with a physics background & over 25 years of experience in international project management & entrepreneurial activities. She consults on a wide range of AI applications, including planetary defence with NASA, ESA & the SETI Institute and continues to manage the community of AI & Machine Learning researchers around the world, remaining knowledgeable in state of the art across all areas of research. She also travels, advises on & teaches NVIDIA’s GPU Computing platform, around the globe. Twitter: @AlisonBLowndes.
Joining in 2015, Alison spent her first 18 months with NVIDIA as a Deep Learning Solutions Architect and is now responsible for NVIDIA's Artificial Intelligence Developer Relations across the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa). She is a mature graduate in Artificial Intelligence combining technical and theoretical computer science with a physics background & over 25 years of experience in international project management & entrepreneurial activities. She consults on a wide range of AI applications, including planetary defence with NASA, ESA & the SETI Institute and continues to manage the community of AI & Machine Learning researchers around the world, remaining knowledgeable in state of the art across all areas of research. She also travels, advises on & teaches NVIDIA’s GPU Computing platform, around the globe. Twitter: @AlisonBLowndes.
Helene Huby
Airbus
Helene has served as Airbus Defence & Space Innovation Director and grew a portfolio of over 50 new businesses ranging from space data-based services to electrical-powered stratospheric drones. Helene has played a critical role in the creation of the Airbus Group Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, Airbus Ventures, and in the Airbus-OneWeb partnership. She also had operational responsibilities, starting and leading a small rocket program.
Helene began her career at the French Ministry of Sciences & Research as Deputy Head of Department for European Affairs. Following her passion for entrepreneurship & Europe, she specialized in digital innovation and joined faberNovel to contribute to the growth of the digital ecosystem through investing in and coaching startups both in France and Germany and leading innovative projects for large companies.
Helene is a Young Leader of the French American Foundation. She privately invests in tech startups and serves as senior Advisor of Red River West (a VC fund that invests into European startups and scale them in the USA) and – among others – as Board Member of ThrustMe.
Helene aspires to contribute to the growth of a peaceful & accessible space ecosystem in which Europe would play a strong role. Helene’s family has lived since decades on both sides on the Atlantic Ocean and her four children are raised in a double German & French culture.
She graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure with a MS in Economics & Applied Mathematics, and from Ecole Nationale d’Administration with a Master of Public Administration.
Helene began her career at the French Ministry of Sciences & Research as Deputy Head of Department for European Affairs. Following her passion for entrepreneurship & Europe, she specialized in digital innovation and joined faberNovel to contribute to the growth of the digital ecosystem through investing in and coaching startups both in France and Germany and leading innovative projects for large companies.
Helene is a Young Leader of the French American Foundation. She privately invests in tech startups and serves as senior Advisor of Red River West (a VC fund that invests into European startups and scale them in the USA) and – among others – as Board Member of ThrustMe.
Helene aspires to contribute to the growth of a peaceful & accessible space ecosystem in which Europe would play a strong role. Helene’s family has lived since decades on both sides on the Atlantic Ocean and her four children are raised in a double German & French culture.
She graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure with a MS in Economics & Applied Mathematics, and from Ecole Nationale d’Administration with a Master of Public Administration.
Bianca Hörsch
ESA
Bianca is ESA’s Chief Digital Officer. As Advisor to ESA’s Director General, located in Headquarters in Paris, she is in charge of ESA’s Digital Transformation. Her responsibilities include establishment of the ESA Digital/IT Strategy, a coherent ESA data and information governance, as well as guiding ESA projects to translate digital technology trendsinto improved customer experience, new organisational capabilities, more efficient work processes and innovations in Space. Furthermore, Bianca is currently leading an ESA-wide team tasked to prepare the ESA strategy on Artificial Intelligence. Before her time as CDO, Bianca worked for 14 years in ESA’s Earth Observation Directorate in Esrin/Frascati, as Mission Manager for the Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation, Proba-V, and in charge of Copernicus Contributing and Third Party Missions Programmes.
Yarin Gal
University Oxford
I am an Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford Computer Science department, and head of the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group (OATML). I am also the Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science at Christ Church, Oxford, and Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science. Prior to my move to Oxford I was a Research Fellow in Computer Science at St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge. I obtained my PhD from the Cambridge machine learning group, working with Prof Zoubin Ghahramani and funded by the Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship. Prior to that I studied at Oxford Computer Science department for a Master's degree under the supervision of Prof Phil Blunsom. Before my MSc I worked as a software engineer for 3 years at IDesia Biometrics developing code and UI for mobile platforms, and did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science at the Open University in Israel.
More to come...
