Mihai Datcu

Mihai Datcu received the M.S. and  Ph.D. degrees in electronics and telecommunications from the University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB), Bucharest, Romania, in 1978 and 1986, respectively, and the Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches degree in computer science from University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France, in 1999.

Since 1981, he has been with the Department of Applied Electronics and Information Engineering, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, UPB. From 1992 to 2002, he had an Invited Professor Assignment with the Institute of Communication Technology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), Zürich, Switzerland. From 1993 to 2023, he was with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), We.ling, Germany, as a Senior Scientist with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) and a Team Leader of the Big Data and AI for Earth Observation. Since 2001, he has been initiating and leading the Competence Center on Information Extraction and Image Understanding for Earth Observation, ParisTech, Paris Institute of Technology, Paris, France, a collaboration of DLR with the French Space Agency (CNES), Paris. From 2005 to 2013, he was a Professor holder of the DLR-CNES Chair, Paris-Tech, Paris Institute of Technology. From 2011 to 2018, he led the Immersive Visual Information Mining Research Laboratory, Munich Aerospace Faculty, Munich, Germany. From 2018 to 2020, he was the holder of the Blaise Pascal International Chair of Excellence, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Paris. He was a Visiting Professor with the University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain; University Louis Pasteur and International Space University, Strasbourg; the University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany; University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria; the University of Alcalá, Alcal´s de Henares, Spain; the University of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy; Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Madrid, Spain; University of Camerino, Camerino, Italy; the University of Trento, Trento, Italy; the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China; Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, Brazil; Wuhan University, Wuhan, China; and the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing, Manno, Switzerland. He is currently a Full Professor and the Director of the Research Center for Spatial Information (CEOSapceTech), UPB. He is also a Visiting Professor with the ESA’s 8-Lab. His research interests include information theory, signal processing, explainable and physics-aware artificial intelligence, computational imaging, and quantum machine learning with applications in EO.

Dr. Datcu is a member of the ESA Working Group Big Data from Space. He was a recipient of the Romanian Academy Prize Traian Vuia for the Development of the SAADI Image Analysis System and his activity in image processing in 1987, the Best Paper Award, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Prize in 2006, the National Order of Merit with the rank of Knight, for outstanding international research results, awarded by the President of Romania in 2008, Chaire d’Excellence Internationale Blaise Pascal 2017 for international recognition in the field of data science in EO, and the 2018 Ad Astra Award for Excellence in Science. He has served as a Co.-organizer for international conferences and workshops. He has served as the Guest editor and an Associate Editor for IEEE and other journals. In 2022, he received the IEEE GRSS David Landgrebe Award in recognition of outstanding contributions to Earth observation analysis using innovative concepts for big data analysis, image mining, machine learning, smart sensors, and quantum resources. He is an IEEE Fellow.