Prof.Dr. Mihai Datcu

Mihai DATCU received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics and Telecommunications from the University Politechnica Bucharest UPB, Romania, in 1978 and 1986. In 1999 he received the title Habilitationà diriger des recherches in Computer Science from University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. Since 1981 he has been Professor with the Department of Applied Electronics and Information Engineering, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology (ETTI), UPB, working in image processing and Electronic Speckle Interferometry. Since 1993, he has been a scientist with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen. He is developing algorithms for model-based information retrieval from high complexity signals and methods for scene understanding from Very High Resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Interferometric SAR data. He is engaged in research related to information theoretical aspects and semantic representations in advanced communication systems. Currently he is Senior Scientist and Image Analysis research group leader with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) of DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen.

Since 2011 he is also leading the Immersive Visual Information Mining research lab t the Munich Aerospace Faculty and he is director of the Research Center for Spatial Information at UPB. His interests are in Bayesian inference, information and complexity theory, stochastic processes, model-based scene understanding, image information mining, for applications in information retrieval and understanding of high resolution SAR and optical observations. He has held Visiting Professor appointments with the University of Oviedo, Spain, the University Louis Pasteur and the International Space University, both in Strasbourg, France, University of Siegen, Germany, University of Innsbruck, Austria, University of Alcala, Spain, University Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, campus de Madrid, Spain, University of Camerino, Italy, the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS), Manno, Switzerland, From 1992 to 2002 he had a longer Invited Professor assignment with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. Since 2001 he has initiated and leaded the Competence Centre on Information Extraction and Image Understanding for Earth Observation, at ParisTech, Paris Institute of Technology, Telecom Paris, a collaboration of DLR with the French Space Agency (CNES). He has been Professor holder of the DLR-CNES Chair at ParisTech, Paris Institute of Technology, Telecom Paris. He initiated the European frame of projects for Image Information Mining (IIM) and is involved in research programs for information extraction, data mining and knowledge discovery and data understanding with the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA, and in a variety of national and European projects. He is a member of the ESA Big Data from Space Working Group.

He and his team have developed and are currently developing the operational IIM processor in the Payload Ground Segment systems for the German missions TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, and the ESA Sentinel 1 and 2. He is the author of more than 200 scientific publications, among them about 60 journal papers, and a book on number theory. He has served as a co-organizer of International Conferences and workshops, and as guest editor of special issue on IIM of the IEEE and other journals. He received in 2006 the Best Paper Award, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Prize, in 2008 the National Order of Merit with the rank of Knight, for outstanding international research results, awarded by the President of Romania, and in 1987 the Romanian Academy Prize Traian Vuia for the development of SAADI image analysis system and activity in image processing. He is representative of Romanian in the ESA Industrial Policy Committee (IPC) and Earth Observation Program Board (EO-PB). He is IEEE Fellow.