Prof. Qihao Weng

Chair Professor of Geomatics and Artificial Intelligence Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics

          Dr. Qihao Weng is a Chair Professor of Geomatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University since July 2021. He worked as the Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Change (July 2004-2021) and a Professor at Indiana State University, 2001-2021, and was a Senior Fellow at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center from Dec. 2008 to Dec. 2009. He received his Ph.D. degree in geography (concentrations: remote sensing, GIS, and environment) from the University of Georgia in 1999. Weng is currently the Lead of the Group on Earth Observation’s (GEO) Global Urban Observation and Information Initiative and serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Additionally, he works as the Series Editor of Taylor & Francis Series in Remote Sensing Applications and Taylor & Francis Series in Imaging Science. Weng has been the Organizer and Program Committee Chair of the biennial IEEE International Workshop on Earth Observation and Remote Sensing Applications conference series since 2008, a National Director of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) from 2007 to 2010, a Trustee of the ISPRS Foundation since 2021, and a panelist of U.S. DOE’s Cool Roofs Roadmap and Strategy committee in 2010.

          In 2008, Weng received a prestigious NASA senior fellowship. He received the Outstanding Contributions Award in Remote Sensing in 2011, the AAG E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award in 2015, the 2020 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors Award, and Outstanding Service Award of AAG China Geography Specialty Group in 2021, all from the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Furthermore, in 2019, he was given a Taylor & Francis Lifetime Achievements Award, and a fellowship from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under the “JSPS Invitational Fellowships for Research in Japan” (Short-term S [E], formerly known as “JSPS Award for Eminent Scientists”). In 2021, Weng was awarded a Global STEM Professorship by the Hong Kong government. At Indiana State University, he was selected as a Lilly Foundation Faculty Fellow in 2015. In the following year, he also received the Theodore Dreiser Distinguished Research Award. Additionally, Weng was the recipient of 2010 Erdas Award for Best Scientific Paper in Remote Sensing (1st place) and the 1999 Robert E. Altenhofen Memorial Scholarship Award, which were both awarded by the ASPRS. He was also awarded the Best Student-Authored Paper Award by the International Geographic Information Foundation in 1998. Weng has been invited to give more than 120 talks by worldwide organizations and conferences and is honored with a visiting professorship in a dozen of universities in Japan, France, and China. Weng was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2018, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2019, the ASPRS in 2020, the AAG and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) in 2021. He is an elected foreign member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) in 2021.

          Weng’s research focuses on remote sensing applications to urban environmental and ecological systems, land-use and land-cover changes, urbanization impacts, urban sustainability, environmental modeling, and human-environment interactions. Through the serial invention of innovative techniques, methods, and theories, Weng’s research efforts have fostered growth in the geographical and environmental applications of the science and technology of remote sensing. Moreover, his research has bridged methodological gaps between geography, landscape ecology, and environmental science, uniting these related fields to design holistic solutions to many environmental, ecological, and climatic issues. Throughout his research career, Weng has authored 266 articles (journal articles, chapters, etc.) and 14 books. Per Google Scholar, as of April 2022, he has been cited more than 26000 times (H-index of 72), and 55 of his publications have more than 100 citations each. Weng’s research has been supported by funding agencies including the NSF, NASA, USGS, USAID, NOAA, National Geographic, and Microsoft.

          Remote sensing eventuated with the development of flight technology, with a symbolic event of taking photographs of Paris from hot-air balloon by G. Tournachon in 1858. Aerial photography was first developed for military surveillance and reconnaissance purposes commencing the World War I and measured up during the Cold War. The development of Earth observing and weather sensors onboard satellites since the second half of the 20th century allows remote sensing to progress to a global scale and provides data for civil, research, and military usages. At the turn of the 21^st century, we have witnessed great advances in remote sensing, in particularly commercial satellites and drones, with innovative sensor technologies as hyperspectral imaging, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and spaceborne radar. These technologies are not isolated at all. In fact, their integrated uses with more established aerial photography and multispectral remote sensing techniques have been the mainstream of current remote sensing research and applications.

          Today, remote sensing has become an essential tool for understanding the Earth and managing human-Earth interactions. The US Department of Labor identified geotechnology, to which remote sensing is a core, as one of the three most important emerging and evolving fields, along with nanotechnology and biotechnology. By integrating with Geographic Information System (GIS), GPS, mobile mapping, Internet Technology and modern telecommunication technologies, remote sensing has contributed to the emergence of abundant geo-referenced information over the web and hands, creating a new geo-referenced “world”. How to process ever increasing remote sensing, and associated geospatial big data, has become a new challenge. In the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing and has been applied to a variety of remote sensing areas. This talk examines the interplay between remote sensing, image/signal processing, AI, and computer vision and how this interplay will likely shape the discipline of remote sensing. Three key science questions will be discussed, including: (1) Is remote sensing a technology, science, or something else? (2) Has recent development in AI re-shaped the field of remote sensing, and if so, how? and (3) Have there been any paradigm shifts in the remote sensing research? If so, how are they associated with research frontiers over time? Can we synthesize advances across those multiple frontiers to advance the remote sensing field?

• Online/ Physical (*subject to the pandemic development）