Plenary Speakers
Biography: Dr. Marta Yebra is a leading expert in environmental engineering and remote sensing for fire risk management. A Professor at ANU's Fenner School of Environment and Society and School of Engineering, she also directs the Bushfire Research Centre of Excellence, working to protect Australia from catastrophic fires. As a Mission Specialist at the ANU Institute for Space, she enhances collaborations between academia and industry and shapes the research agenda in Earth Observation.
Beyond academia, Dr. Yebra plays a key role in government advisory boards, including the Australian Capital Territory Multi-Hazards Advisory Council, shaping policies on disaster resilience and fire management.
With a career spanning top institutions worldwide, she has received prestigious awards, including the Max Day Environmental Science Fellowship by the Australian Academy of Science and the 2023 Academic of the Year by the Australian Space Award. A sought-after speaker, she has presented at over 30 national and international conferences.
Biography: Dr. Karen Joyce is biographer for Mother Earth, using satellites and drones as my professional photographers. With 25 years of experience as a geospatial scientist across academia, the military, industry, and small business, I help people see science beyond lab coats and test tubes. But I have an ulterior motive—I’m on a mission to harness Earth observation and geospatial technology to monitor environmental change. The more people I can inspire to join me, the faster we can develop solutions to keep our planet healthy for future generations.
Biography: Dr. Xiaoxiang Zhu is the Chair Professor for Data Science in Earth Observation at Technical University of Munich (TUM) and was the founding Head of the Department ``EO Data Science'' at the Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR). Since May 2020, she is the PI and director of the international future AI lab "AI4EO -- Artificial Intelligence for Earth Observation: Reasoning, Uncertainties, Ethics and Beyond", Munich, Germany. Since October 2020, she also serves as a Director of the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI), TUM. From 2019 to 2022, Zhu has been a co-coordinator of the Munich Data Science Research School (www.mu-ds.de) and the head of the Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence -- Research Field ``Aeronautics, Space and Transport". Prof. Zhu was a guest scientist or visiting professor at the Italian National Research Council (CNR-IREA), Naples, Italy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan and University of California, Los Angeles, United States in 2009, 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively. She is currently a visiting AI professor at ESA's Phi-lab, Frascati, Italy. Her main research interests are remote sensing and Earth observation, signal processing, machine learning and data science, with their applications in tackling societal grand challenges, e.g. Global Urbanization, UN's SDGs and Climate Change.
Dr. Zhu has been a member of young academy (Junge Akademie/Junges Kolleg) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She is a Fellow of the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe). She serves in the scientific advisory board in several research organizations, among others the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ, 2020-2023) and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). She is an associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Pattern Recognition and served as the area editor responsible for special issues of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2021-2023). She is a Fellow of IEEE, AAIA, and ELLIS.