Xiaoxiang Zhu - Biography#

Xiaoxiang Zhu is Full Professor for Data Science in Earth Observation at the Technical University of Munich, the Director of the international AI future Lab “AI4EO”, and a Director of the Munich Data Science Institute.

Her research focuses on signal processing and data science in Earth observation (EO). Geo-information derived from EO satellite data is indispensable for many scientific, governmental and planning tasks. She develops innovative machine learning methods and big data analytics solutions to extract geo-information from big EO data. Her team aims at tackling societal grand challenges, e.g. Global Urbanization, UN’s SDGs and Climate Change, thus, works on solutions that can scale up for global applications.

Prof Zhu is the recipient of, for example, the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis of the DFG, Innovators under 35 of Technology Review Germany, ERC Starting Grant, two ERC Proof of Concept Grants, PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC, Helmholtz Excellence Professorship and the Leopoldina Early Career Award of the German National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of young academy (Junge Akademie/Junges Kolleg) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

She has published more than 220 publications in peer-reviewed journals and another 173 peer-reviewed conference papers (including CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, NeurIPs etc.) and 1 co-edited book. She has an h-index of 78 with 25700+ citations (Google Scholar). She has received more than 10 best paper awards. Since 2022 her work has been included in the list of “Highly Cited Scientists” by Clarivate in the field “Geosciences”. According to ScholarGPS, in 2022 she ranks #2 worldwide as the highly ranked scholars in remote sensing during prior 5 years. Since 2009, she has given more than 120 invited talks, among them 105 invited keynote speeches/open lectures/seminars. She is an associate Editor of IEEE TGRS, Pattern Recognition and serves as the area editor of IEEE SPM. She is a Fellow of IEEE and ELLIS. She serves in the Scientific Committee of almost all relevant EO and remote-sensing conferences. She was GT of IEEE Whispers 2018 and an area chair of NeurIPs 2023.

See: https://www.asg.ed.tum.de/sipeo/team/zhu