• Date: 9-13 January 2023
• Location: Hotel Caracol, Terceira Island, Azores (Timezone: UTC -1; GMT-1), Portugal
  
• Event Type: Hybrid, full-week, technical and networking
• Registration for attendance in person is by invitation only
• Registration for online attendance

• Slack channel: julialang.slack.com juliaeo (Channel ID: C0480TAQJ9Y)
• Preparatory session - Intro to using Docker for the workshop:
• Video
• Document
• GitHub: JuliaEO repository (notebooks)
• Dataverse: JuliaEO repository (datasets)
• Subscribe to the workshop calendar
  Note that the Zoom links in this calendar are for online participants. Speakers will receive their own individual links via email.

The training workshop aims at developing the computer programming skills of those working on Earth Observation, including the members of the Earth Observation Laboratory (EO Lab) and other laboratories.

To stimulate collaboration beyond the training, the workshop is in person (full week). However, due to the high level of interest, remote participation is also possible.

The topics covered include acquisition, processing, visualisation, and classification of Earth Observation data, using the Julia programming language.

The training workshop will emphasize practical activities including the use of datasets, libraries/packages, automated workflows, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and classification algorithms. Theory-oriented sessions will introduce the concepts and hands-on activities.

The open-source Julia language is relatively recent. It was created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first released in 2012, and reached the v1.0 milestone in 2018. Julia has a vocation for high-performance scientific computing, making it today’s ideal choice to work on resource-intensive datasets such as the Earth Observation ones.

Mutual benefits expected to arise from the collaboration of the AIR Centre and the Julia community include:

• Capacity building for AIR Centre’s staff and other invited institutions.
• Create collaboration opportunities between the participants and speakers.
• Create the potential to extend the Portuguese contribution to the scientific community.
• Bringing together the two communities around Julia: developers and end-users.
• Opening new avenues for collaboration on both software and science.
• Contributing to strengthening the open source / science community.
• Creating an axis of collaboration to study the Azores region using Earth Observation, numerical models, and data products.
• Finding new prospective contributors to Julia packages; helping developers build up their user community; identifying needs and desired new features.
• Providing additional exposure for the products and activity of the AIR Centre; via US and EU growing Julia communities.

The workshop will encompass different levels of expertise, from beginner to advanced, with a focus on Earth Observation concepts and programming skills. Our idea is to provide a single track of sessions in the morning and more detailed parallel sessions in the afternoon and to split people evenly on the double track part. There are three types of activities:

• Plenary sessions (45’) - Cross-disciplinary training focused on theory and high-level concepts. These include the presentation of novel EO datasets i.e. satellite data, ocean models, and model products; processing & visualization techniques as well as available tools and packages. The first goal is to learn about new datasets and sources, libraries, packages, techniques, and implementation details. A secondary aim of this module is to identify gaps in the EO domain and opportunities to close those gaps using the Julia programming language.

• Hands-on sessions (1h55’) - The modules will focus on concrete goals in data acquisition, processing & visualization techniques for example. They are designed to bridge between concepts and real-life application through extended tutorials. Attendees will get an introduction, through these tutorials, to performing common geospatial tasks using Julia geospatial tools and common geospatial libraries and packages.

• General hackathons (1h) - Session that brings together Julia developers to enhance collaboration on EO applications and software development. The goal is to organize the last module of the day in the common room and enable everyone to work on intermediate & advanced level aspects according to their specific interests.

 10:05 - 11:00: 1.1- Plots, Animations, & Graphics S. Danisch

 11:05 - 12:00: 1.2- Visualization of Earth Observations Data L. Alonso

 10:05 - 10:45: 1.1- Gathering Gridded Data over Ocean Provinces 

 10:45 - 11:30: 1.2- Sea Level and Drifting Buoys near Azores 

 11:30 - 12:00: 1.3- AIR Centre work with the Marine Debris Archive (MARIDA) 

The following speakers have been selected from the Julia community to participate in this training event. The speakers involve a mix of seasoned and young/aspiring scientists. The selection was based on the level of skill and commitment demonstrated, with contributions to the EO software packages which are most needed for AIR Centre’s current work and future development.

Additionally, there are a small group of scientists from the AIR Centre or related to its activities.

Adriano Lima

Adriano Lima is Senior Project Officer and MBON Scientific Programmer at the Air Centre. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering with emphasis on environmental hydraulics from Hokkaido University, Japan. He has experience working as assistant professor, principal researcher and team manager, with focus on computational fluid dynamics, data science, aquaculture and multiple sectors of the blue economy.

• Profile

Alexander Barth

Alexander Barth is a researcher working at the University of Liege (Belgium) in the GHER group (GeoHydrodynamics and Environment Research). He did a PhD on nested numerical ocean models and data assimilation. Currently he is working on variational analysis schemes for climatologies and neural networks to reconstruct missing data.

• GitHub
• ORCID

André Valente

Andre Valente is a physical oceanographer interested in satellite remote sensing applications. He specializes in the integration of satellite, model and in-situ data, for applications such as the study of ocean climate variability and physical-biological interactions . He holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Azores and a Degree in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Lisbon. He is currently woking at the Earth Observation Lab of the AIR Centre and previously worked at the University of Lisbon, where he was team member of several projects, such as the recent ESA Ocean-Colour Climate Change Initiative.

• ORCID

Eigil Yuichi Hyldgaard Lippert

I am currently pursuing a Ph.d. in Numerical Glaciology in which I am working with a reconstruction of the Greenland ice sheet and its glaciers, going back to the last little ice age. This work is mostly centered around finite element modeling of glaciers and trying to understand their main drivers and dynamics.

Before this, I did a master’s degree in engineering, focused on earth observation data, large-scale physics, and machine learning. I was involved in satellite observation and analysis and developed a method for synthesizing landslides in the InSAR coherence domain and building an algorithm that could detect these signatures in real-world SAR Coherence data. I also developed an InSAR coherence processor in Julia which could process SLC data and create interferograms and coherence estimates. I am currently in the process of porting this work into an open-source library, together with 3 other people.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• ORCID

Emanuel Castanho

He holds a master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Beira Interior (Covilhã). Currently, he works at the EO Lab as a Project Developer in projects such as AEROS, ECOBLUE, LABPLAS, PORTXXI and K2D. His main focus is to use programming as a main tool to handle remote sensing data, in particular optical satellite data, in order to fight real problems (plastic pollution and climate change).

• GitHub

Fabian Gans

• GitHub

Felix Cremer

Felix Cremer received his diploma in mathematics from the University of Leipzig in 2014. In 2016 he started his PhD study on time series analysis of hypertemporal Sentinel-1 radar data.
He is interested in the use of irregular time series tools on Synthetic Aperture Radar data to derive more robust information from these data sets.
He worked on the development of deforestation mapping algorithms and on flood mapping in the amazon using Sentinel-1 data.
He currently works at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry on the development of the JuliaDataCubes ecosystem in the scope of the NFDI4Earth project. The JuliaDataCubes organisation provides easy to use interfaces for the use of multi dimensional raster data.

• GitHub
• ORCID

Frank Muller-Karger

Frank Muller-Karger is a biological oceanographer (Professor) at the College of Marine Science, University of South Florida. Muller-Karger conducts research on how marine ecosystems change in time. He uses time series of observations collected by traditional oceanographic methods and by satellite sensors to study changes in water quality, primary production, and biodiversity in coastal and marine environments. This research helps in understanding how large-scale phenomena, like climate change or other disturbances, affect ecosystems including people.
The focus of his present work is to assess the importance of continental margins, including areas of upwelling, river discharge, and coral reefs in the global carbon budget. Muller-Karger combines the observations from different satellites to measure ocean color, sea surface temperature, winds, salinity and sea surface elevation and how these change. He uses field-based time series to measure the vertical structure of plankton and how particles settle in the ocean. Much of this work focuses on improving methods to measure the diversity of phytoplankton using remote sensing.
Muller-Karger has worked hand-in-hand with K-12 teachers and students and the public to showcase these new technologies and to highlight the importance of the ocean in our daily lives. He has a keen interest in linking science and education, and in addressing the problem of under-representation of minorities in scientific research programs. Muller-Karger was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy in 2001. In 2005, he was appointed to the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council/National Academies. He previously received the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Award for Outstanding Contributions and the NASA Administrator Award for Exceptional Contribution and Service for supporting development of satellite technologies for ocean observation. From August 2007-August 2009 he served as Dean of the School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in marine science and a Masters degree in management, and has authored or co-authored over 120 scientific publications.

• Profile
• ORCID

Gaël Forget

Currently works as a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Research interests and expertise include satellite observations, ocean robots, marine ecosystems, ocean physics, numerical modeling, and estimation in general (incl. AI, ML, DA, & AD). Created the JuliaOcean and JuliaClimate organizations. Lead developer of a series of Julia packages focused on ocean and climate science. These include MeshArrays.jl (JuliaCon18), ClimateModels.jl (JuliaCon21), and OceanRobots (JuliaCon21).

• GitHub
• Twitter
• ORCID

Iga Szczesniak

Iga is a Project Developer at the Earth Observation Laboratory of the AIR Centre. She holds a master’s degree in Geoinformatics, Photogrammetry, and Remote Sensing obtained at the University of Science and Technology in Cracow. During her academic career, she conducted research at Aalto University, Finland focusing on the cryosphere, glacier monitoring, and SAR technology. Prior to joining AIR Centre, she analyzed the EO market and innovative usages of Copernicus Sentinels data while interning at European Space Agency.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Twitter

Júlio Hoffimann

Dr. Júlio has more than 10 years of experience in advanced statistical theories for geosciences. He is creator and lead developer of the GeoStats.jl project, as well as various other open source projects that are widely used by geoscientists around the world.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• ORCID

Kristian Sørensen

Kristian Sørensen received the bachelor and master degree in Earth and Space Physics and Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, in 2018 and 2021 respectively and has a specialization in Earth Observation. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. degree at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark. In his work, he is trying to increase maritime domain awareness and surveillance using satellite data and artificial intelligence. His research interests include ship trajectory prediction using deep learning, and satellite data fusion with, e.g., Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and AIS data.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• ORCID

Lazaro Alonso

Lazaro Alonso is a Mexican physicist currently working at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in the Model Data Integration Group. Interested in Hybrid Model-Based approaches to climate sciences as well as scientific visualization. Other interests of his are complex networks, graph neural networks and time series analysis.

He is a coauthor of the Julia Data Science book and main contributor to the gallery https://beautiful.makie.org/ and contributes as much as possible to open source in his spare time if any.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Twitter

Maarten Pronk

Maarten Pronk is a researcher at Deltares and an external PhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology. He holds a MSc in Geomatics and a BSc in Architecture, both from the Delft University of Technology (NL). His research concerns elevation modelling, especially in lowlands prone to coastal flooding. He aims to combine his interests in remote sensing and software engineering for societal impact. He promotes open and reproducible research and is the author of several open-source software packages for handling geospatial data, written in the Julia programming language. His work often involves handling trillions of elevation measurements, requiring a careful selection and design of both spatial storage formats and processing algorithms. Currently he works on applying data from ICESat-2, a LiDAR satellite, on global elevation models.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Twitter
• ORCID

Martijn Visser

Martijn Visser is a hydrologist at Deltares, where he focuses on integrated water resources management, as well as building open source software to support it. As an early adopter of the Julia programming language he’s been active in the open source community, helping to set up and maintain JuliaGeo and its packages, which aim to make it easier to work with geospatial data in Julia.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Twitter
• ORCID

Milan Klöwer

Milan Klöwer is a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He did his PhD at the University of Oxford, working on climate model development, low precision computing, data compression and information theory, predictability of weather and climate, and software engineering. During that time, he proposed the bitwise real information content as a way to distinguish between valuable information and noise in climate data, with the reference implementation BitInformation.jl. He currently develops SpeedyWeather.jl, a global atmospheric model designed to be a computational research playground to develop prototype ideas on computationally efficient climate models.

• GitHub
• Mastodon
• Twitter
• ORCID

Nathanael Wong

Nathanael is a 4th Year PhD Candidate at Harvard University studying Tropical Climate Dynamics using a range of tools, from satellite observations and reanalysis datasets, to climate models that range from idealized small-domains, to global models. For the past three years, he has used Julia to aid in the retrieval and analysis of various climate observational datasets, and in the future aims to use Julia to help speed up the analysis of climate model output. Currently, he works under Professor Kuang to understand the differences in precipitation and moisture dynamics over tropical islands from both oceanic and continental regions.

• GitHub
• Twitter

Rafael Schouten

Rafael Schouten is an Australian macroecologist with a background in niche and dispersal modelling of terrestrial plant and animal distributions in the context of climate, invasive species and deforestation. Currently he is doing a PhD in drivers of island extinctions at the Center for Macroecology, Evoloution and Climate in Copenhagen.

Rafael authors Rasters.jl and packages on spatial process modelling such as DynamicGrids.jl along with a number of supporting tools like DimensionalData.jl and ModelParameters.jl. He also works on or co-maintains a number of the JuliaGeo packages and related tools.

• GitHub
• ORCID

Simon Danisch

Simon is the author of Makie and currently works full time on Makie as a freelancer. He has been part of the Julia community for more than 10 years and is the author of many Julia packages. To just name a few that are still actively used by many people in the Julia community: Makie, GeometryBasics, GPUArrays, PackageCompiler, JSServe and FileIO.

His mission has always been, to create a sustainable plotting and graphics ecosystem for Julia, which enables visualizations in need of high performance as well as making it very easy to quickly create simple plots and integrate them into dashboards.

Nowadays, with Climate change threatening to destroy the fundament of our modern life, he is focusing his efforts on making sure that Makie works well for climate science to better understand the changes that are coming for us.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Twitter
• ORCID

Simon Kok Lupemba

Junior Remote Sensing Scientist at EUMETSAT working in the scatterometry team. I support the quality monitoring, calibration and validation of operational scatterometer products and also prototype and maintain processing software for the extraction of products.

I am a MSc graduate in Earth and Space Physics and Engineering from DTU and I have hands-on experience working with SAR data from my studies. Most of my academic projects focused on processing SAR images e.g. speckle filtering, interferometric coherence and automated flood mapping. I have implemented InSAR coherence processing in Julia (programming language) without using commercial software or SAR related libraries.

I have also worked as an IT-consultant at Netcompany for 2 years where I was involved with support, maintenance and development of medium-sized public IT projects. My regular tasks included; defining and estimating tasks, developing new features, fixing existing bugs and providing general support.

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

• Capacity building of the AIR Centre and invited institutions.
• Establish relationships with, and expand the Julia community.
• Establish the AIRCentre as an active member of the Julia community.
• Contribute to the development of existing packages.
• Identify opportunities for the creation of new packages.
• Strengthen the scientific community/network around the Atlantic/world.
• Seeding future collaborations.

1. Is there a fee to attend the workshop? No.
2. Do I need to register to attend the workshop?
   Yes. If you (your institution) received an invitation, please write to juliaeo@aircentre.org and request access to the form to register.
   
3. Does the AIR Centre provide transfers between the airport and the hotel? Yes, but only for the speakers on Terceira Island.
4. How to access the Slack channel? Go to the julialang.slack.com Workspace and type juliaeo2023 in the Slack search bar.

The workshop will take place at Hotel do Caracol in Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira Island. The hotel is located close to the Historic Centre of the Town of Angra do Heroísmo ​​inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Invited speakers will also be hosted at the hotel.

In-person participants who wish to stay at the hotel shall mention the event to get special pricing.

• Joao Pinelo, Iga Szczesniak, Andre Valente (AIR Centre)

• Gael Forget (MIT)