Advanced Urban Remote Sensing Workshop Successfully Held

From Dec 3rd to 4th, 2022, an international conference, Advanced Urban Remote Sensing Workshop (AURSW), was successfully held at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). The workshop was co-chaired by Professor Peng GONG, Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Development) of HKU, and Professor Qihao WENG, Chair Professor of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). The workshop demonstrated the state of the art of urban remote sensing techniques, methods, applications, and its implication for sustainable development.

Ir Professor Christopher Chao, Vice President (Research and Innovation) of PolyU, Chair Professor of Thermal and Environmental Engineering, and Director of Policy Research Centre for Innovation and Technology (PReCIT), attended the workshop and gave an opening speech on behalf of PolyU.

As conference co-chair, Prof. Weng Qihao, a Chair Professor of Geomatics and Artificial Intelligence at Dept of LSGI, and Director of JC STEM Lab of Earth Observations at PolyU was invited to give a keynote lecture on “Three Decades of Urban Remote Sensing in Perspective”. Prof. Weng also introduced to the audience the newly founded IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Hong Kong Chapter, in which he serves as the Chair. Researchers and students from PolyU, HKU, CUHK, CityU, HKBU and HKUST and other organizations have joined this chapter.

The workshop was conducted in a hybrid mode. It consists of one and a half day’s workshop and a half-day field trip. Nearly 30 LSGI academic staff, research staff, and students participated in the workshop actively. Prof. Wu Chen (Head of LSGI), Prof. Xiaoli Ding (Director of Research Institute of Land and Space), and Prof. John WZ Shi (Director of Smart Cities Research Institute) attended the workshop. Prof. Xiaoli Zhu, Associate Professor, gave a talk on Remote sensing image fusion for urban environment monitoring. Member of JC STEM Lab of Earth Observations, Dr. Cheolhee Yoo (Research Assistant Professor), gave a talk titled Industrial and Non-Industrial Urban Land Expansion: An examination of the complex relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions. PhD student Jiafei Xu talked on Enhanced all-weather precipitable water vapor retrieval from MODIS near infrared bands based on machine learning.

The workshop attracted top urban remote sensing experts from USA, Europe, and China, and brought together researchers from academic institutions and end users from the industry for a comprehensive discussion on the newest research in the field of remote sensing after the three years of the pandemic. Young researchers and students were involved in many in-depth discussions with senior researchers in the urban remote sensing field.