Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the two winners of the 2018 Travel Awards sponsored by ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information:

Travel Awards have been granted to Dr. Yanbiao Sun from University College London (UCL), London, UK and Dr. Marco Minghini from Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy.

Dr. Yanbiao Sun joined UCL from Tianjin University in 2017 as a postdoctoral researcher in the Light Controlled Factory Project. He works in the field of digital mapping photogrammetry and industrial photogrammetry, with notable research in non-linear optimization methods used for photogrammetric applications. His current work includes two aspects: photogrammetric optimization and coded target design. He has always been looking for efficient and robust algorithms to address problems faced in images-based navigation and position. Dr. Yanbiao Sun, working with Prof. Stuart Robson, designed new planar coded targets, in which each coded target includes five fixed circle dots and another three coded circle dots. Now, the coded targets have been successfully used in robotic tracking and positioning in the UCL project. In the future, Dr. Yanbiao Sun will focus on accurate and real-time tracking of industrial photogrammetry.

Dr. Marco Minghini’s research spans the domains of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing. He is an early career scientist working on Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) mapping and education. He is also a Charter Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo, https://www.osgeo.org) and GeoForAll (https://www.osgeo.org/initiatives/geo-for-all). He has addressed several aspects of this field: the development of platforms for VGI collection (mainly from mobile devices) and management; the role of VGI to increase public participation; the analysis of VGI data to understand contribution patterns and contributors' motivations; the assessment of VGI quality, in particular positional accuracy and completeness; the relevance of protocols to guide data collection in VGI projects; VGI applications to disaster response; the role of VGI in education; and the exploitation of VGI in deriving scientific datasets such as LULC maps.

The awards consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to attend an academic conference in 2018.

We would like to thank the Selection Committee members Tao Cheng, Bin Jiang and Sisi Zlatanova for their evaluation of candidates.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kainz
Editor-in-Chief