Acronym: 
DLR
Country: 
Germany

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is the national aeronautics and space research centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its extensive research and development work in aeronautics, space, energy, transport, security and digitalisation is integrated into national and international cooperative ventures. In addition to its own research, as Germany’s space agency, DLR has been given responsibility by the federal government for the planning and implementation of the German space programme. DLR is also the umbrella organisation for the nation’s largest project management agency. DLR has approximately 8000 employees at 20 locations in Germany. DLR’s research portfolio ranges from fundamental research to the development of products for tomorrow. The Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) is an institute of DLR mainly located at Oberpfaffenhofen (near Munich). Research and development activities at IMF are dedicated to remote sensing technology. Algorithms and methods are developed to configure processors that extract relevant geoinformation from remote sensing data. Operational processors are the prerequisite for optimal utilization of modern sensor systems for advanced scientific purposes and numerous applications. IMF focuses on remote sensing with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), imaging with optical sensors, and atmospheric spectrometry.

Role of DLR in CANDELA project:

DLR will lead the data mining and data fusion tasks in WP2 and data science workflows task in WP3 and will contribute to WP1 and WP4.

Key scientific / technical personnel in CANDELA project:

Prof. Mihai Datcu: Since 1981 has been Professor with Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications, Univerity Politehnica Bucharest, Romania. Since 1993, he has been a scientist with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), as Senior Scientist and Data Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery research group leader. From 1992 to 2002 he had a longer Invited Professor assignment with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. From 2005 to 2013 has been Professor holder of the DLR-CNES Chair at ParisTech, Telecom Paris. In 2017, he has awarded with Blaise Pascal Chair, for international recognition of contributions in Earth Observation Data Science, Chair at CNAM/CEDRIC, Paris. His interests are in Information Theory, Signal Processing, Statistics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Octavian Dumitru: Since 2010 has been a Scientist with the Remote Sensing Technology Institute, Earth Observation Center, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. At the Politehnica University between 2002 and 2006, he had a teaching activity as a Lecturer, delivering lectures and seminaries and supervising laboratory works in the fields of information and estimation theory, communication theory, and signal processing.

Currently, he is involved in several projects with the European Space Agency and European H2020 Programmes for information extraction, taxonomies, and data mining and knowledge discovery using remote sensing imagery.

Consortium

CANDELA team is a well-balanced consortium, consisting of seven partners from five European countries, and with strong participation from the industry as encouraged by the Call, being half of the partners well positioned SME’s.