Society; a Visiting Professor with the City University of Hong Kong (2001); and a ... Laboratory of Wave Scattering and Remote Sensing Information (Ministry of ... Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING ...
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, JUNE 2012
675
Foreword to the Special Issue on IGARSS 2012
S
ENDAI was selected as the city to host IGARSS 2011. More than 2000 abstracts were submitted and the technical committee meeting of IGARSS 2011 was held in San Francisco, CA, on the 4th of March. We selected the highest quality papers to be presented at the symposium. Then the earthquake and the tsunami struck east Japan on the 11th of March, 2011. The city of Sendai, one of the major cities in northeast Japan with a population of 1 million, is located 150 km from the epicenter of this huge earthquake. More than 700 people were killed inside Sendai city alone, and almost 20,000 were killed all over Japan. Fortunately, Sendai has nearly recovered to its normal functioning. A few weeks after the earthquake, most of us had returned to our daily routine. However, at that time the organizing committee still had many unknown factors that affected the planned symposium. In particular, some countries restricted trips to Japan. We started a survey of alternative venues for IGARSS, and fortunately, we found the Vancouver convention center not only an alternative, but a very good venue for IGARSS 2011.
When the Symposium finally began, we had 1475 registered participants from 56 countries. For this special issue, we received 93 submissions, and after peer review, 41 papers will be published, which cover the variety of topics that were covered in the IGARSS 2011.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTARS.2012.2205994
YA-QIU JIN, Guest Editor Key Laboratory of Wave Scattering and Remote Sensing Information Fudan University Shanghai, China MOTOYUKI SATO, Guest Editor Tohoku University Sendai, Japan YOSHIO YAMAGUCHI, Guest Editor Faculty of Engineering Niigata University Niigata, Japan
Ya-Qiu Jin (SM’89-F’04) received the B.S. degree from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1970, and the M.S., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1982, 1983, and 1985, respectively. He was a Research Scientist with the Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., Cambridge, MA (1985); a Research Associate with the City University of New York (1986-1987); a Visiting Professor with the University of York, U.K. (1993-1994) sponsored by the U.K. Royal Society; a Visiting Professor with the City University of Hong Kong (2001); and a Visiting Professor with Tohoku University, Japan (2005). He held the Senior Research Associateship at NOAA/NESDIS awarded by the USA National Research Council (1996). He is currently a Professor with the School of Information Science and Engineering, and the Director of the Key Laboratory of Wave Scattering and Remote Sensing Information (Ministry of Education), Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He has been appointed as the Principal Scientist for the China State Key Basic Research Project (2001–2006) by the Ministry of National Science and Technology of China to lead the remote sensing program in China. He has published more than 510 papers in China and abroad and eight books, three of which are in English [Electromagnetic Scattering Modeling for Quantitative Remote Sensing (World Scientific, 1994), Information of Electromagnetic Scattering and Radiative Transfer in Natural Media (Science Press, 2000), Theory and Approach for Information Retrieval from Electromagnetic Scattering and Remote Sensing (Springer, 2005)]. He is the Editor of SPIE Volume 3503 Microwave Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere and Environment, and the book Wave Propagation, Scattering and Emission in Complex Media (World Scientific and Science Press, 2004). His main research interests include scattering and radiative transfer in complex natural media, microwave remote sensing, as well as theoretical modeling, information retrieval and applications in atmosphere, ocean, and Earth surfaces, and computational electromagnetics. Dr. Jin was elected IEEE Fellow for his contributions to electromagnetic scattering model for remote sensing applications. He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING since 2007. He was Chairman of ISAPE’2000, the Specialist Workshop 2004 on EM scattering and Information Retrieval in Remote Sensing, and the 6th Asia-Pacific Engineering Research Forum on Microwaves and Electromagnetic Theory Workshop (2006). He is the founder Chairman of the IEEE GRSS Beijing Chapter (1998–2003) and received appreciation for his notable service and contributions toward the advancement of IEEE professions from IEEE GRSS. He received the China National Science Prize in 1993, the First-Grade Science Prizes of the Ministry of Education in 1992 and 1996, the State Book Prize in 1997, the Teaching Excellence Prize of Shanghai 1939-1404/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE
676
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 5, NO. 3, JUNE 2012
City in 2001, the Excellent Supervisor for Graduate Students in Fudan University in 2003, and the Fudan President Prize in 2004, among many other prizes.
Motoyuki Sato (S’79–M’80–SM’02–F’10) received the B.E. and M.E degrees, and the Dr. Eng. degree in information engineering from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1980, 1982, and 1985, respectively. Since 1997, he has been a Professor at Tohoku University, and a Distinguished Professor of Tohoku University since 2007, and he has been the Director of the Center for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University since 2009. From 1988 to 1989, he was a visiting researcher at the Federal German Institute for Geoscience and Natural Resources (BGR) in Hannover, Germany. His current interests include transient electromagnetics and antennas, radar polarimetry, ground penetrating radar (GPR), borehole radar, electromagnetic induction sensing, interferometric and polarimetric SAR. He has conducted the development of GPR sensors for humanitarian demining, and his sensor ALIS, a handheld dual sensor, has detected more than 80 mines in mine fields in Cambodia since May 2009. He is a visiting Professor at Jilin University, China, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Dr. Sato is a member of the GRSS AdCom (since 2006) where he is responsible for specialty symposia and Asian issues. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE GRSS Newsletter and was a guest editor of the special issues on GPR’2006 and GPR’2010 in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING. He was the chair of the IEEE GRSS Japan Chapter from 2006 to 2007. He served as the general chair of IGARSS 2011.
Yoshio Yamaguchi (M’83–SM’94–F’02) received the B.E. degree in electronics engineering from Niigata University, Japan, in 1976, and the M.E. and Dr. Eng. degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1978 and 1983, respectively. In 1978, he joined the Faculty of Engineering, Niigata University. From 1988 to 1989, he was a Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His interests are in the field of radar polarimetry, microwave sensing and imaging. Dr. Yamaguchi has served as Chair of IEEE GRSS Japan Chapter (2002–2003), Chair of URSI-F Japan (2006–2011), Associate Editor for Asian Affairs of the IEEE GRSS Newsletter (2003–2007), and was TPC co-chair of IGARSS 2011. He is a Fellow of IEICE, Japan, and was a recipient of the 2008 IEEE GRSS Education Award.