Education:

I received the BSc degree in civil (survey) engineering from the Tehran South Campus of Azad University, Tehran, Iran, in 2008, the MSc degree (Hons.) in remote sensing from the K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2012, and the PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering with the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, where I received my PhD degree in less than three years in 2015.

In 2013 and 2014, I was with the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, supported by an Australian International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS). In 2015, I received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship and started my work as a postdoc research fellow with the Technical University of Munich (host) and Heidelberg University (co-host), Germany, working on remotely sensed multisensor data fusion. In parallel with my appointment as the Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow, from 2015 to 2018 I was also a Research Scientist with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, working on deep learning-based algorithm development for remote sensing data.

I currently work as (1) head of the machine learning group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany (HZDR); (2) CTO and co-founder of VasoGnosis Inc., USA; and (3) Visiting Professor and chair of AI4RS at the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI), Austria. Let me explain a bit about these responsibilities in more detail. In 2018, I won HZDR’s High Potential Program (HPP) Team Leadership award and started my work as the Head of the Machine Learning Group at HZDR, working on the development of multisensor, multiscale, and multitemporal remote sensing data fusion using advanced deep learning and machine learning approaches. To expand my experience in industry and bridge the gap between academia and industry, in 2019 I co-founded a start-up company in the USA together with my colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where I work as CTO and Co-Founder [Link]. At VasoGnosis, I lead the development team to produce advanced diagnostic and analysis tools for neurovascular diseases based on deep learning and cloud computing. Very recently, we launched our industry-level product, VG RECON, a deep-learning-based visualization solution for rendering Magnetic Resonance Angiograms (MRA) [Link]. In 2020, I started my work as a visiting professor and the chair of AI4RS at the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IARAI), Vienna, Austria. I am establishing a team at IARAI dedicated to large-scale remote sensing and citizen-generated data [Link].

I voluntarily work as the vice-chair of the Image Analysis and Data Fusion Technical Committee (IADF TC) [Link] of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). With almost 1000 members, IADF TC is the most well-established technical committee within IEEE GRSS. IADF serves as a global, multi-disciplinary network for geospatial image analysis (considering techniques from fields such as machine learning, deep learning, image and signal processing, and big data) and data fusion (e.g., multisensor, multiscale, and multitemporal data integration). It aims at connecting people and resources, educating students and professionals, and promoting theoretical advances and best practices in image analysis and data fusion. As one of our activities at IADF, we organize the IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest (DFC) on an annual basis, e.g., IEEE GRSS DFC 2020 [Link] , IEEE DFC 2021 (Track MSD) [Link], and IEEE DFC 2021 (Track DSE) [Link], together with our partners at DLR, TUM, and Microsoft.

So that I can interact with students, I voluntarily teach at the Humboldt University of Berlin as a lecturer, where I offer semester-long seminars\courses on deep learning and sensor fusion (e.g., Deep Learning for Landcover Mapping and Multisensor Data Fusion: Evolution from Shallow to Deep).

My research interests include interdisciplinary research on machine (deep) learning and signal (image) processing with a sharp focus on remote sensing. I serve as the Associate Editor of several well-established journals, Remote Sensing-MDPI, Sensors-MDPI, IEEE JSTARS, and IEEE GRSL.

My research has been recognized with a number of honors, beginning in the 2010-11 academic year when I received the Best Researcher Award for MSc students at K.N. Toosi University of Technology. In July 2013, I presented at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Melbourne, and was awarded the IEEE Mikio Takagi Prize for winning the conference Student Paper Competition against almost 70 people . In 2017, our group, composing of three researchers, won the Data Fusion Contest 2017 organized by the Image Analysis and Data Fusion Technical Committee, where our approach was selected as the most accurate one among more than 800 submissions . The contest was on the topic of Multisensor and Multitemporal Data Fusion for Local Climate Zone Classification. I was also recognized as the winner of the 2017 Best Reviewer Prize of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (GRSL) . Although very young, I am recognized as a senior member of IEEE . IEEE Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession. Very recently, I received one of the most precious awards of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society – the 2020 Highest Impact Paper Award for the paper by Y. Chen, H. Jiang, C. Li, X. Jia and P. Ghamisi, “Deep Feature Extraction and Classification of Hyperspectral Images Based on Convolutional Neural Networks,” in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 54, no. 10, pp. 6232–6251, Oct. 2016. It was my further honor to have my work recognized by my home country through selection as a Talented International Researcher by Iran’s National Elites Foundation (2016).