Wednesday, December 9, 2020
12 PM (Noon) US Pacific Time
8 PM UTC
3 PM US Eastern Time
Speaker: Dr. Hesham El-Askary, Chapman Univ., USA
Sponsored by GRSS
GRSS Webinar: EO addressing SDGS and Global Environmental Challenges
The United Nation sets 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, including equality, climate, food safety, finance, etc. This work reports our collective investigations of four SDG goals in the hotspot Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, using synergistic approaches of earth observations (EO) and modeling. We show EO capacities to quantify the solar energy losses from extreme dust conditions in sun-privileged locations such as Egypt. We also demonstrate the applications of artificial intelligence and big data analysis to the climate studies in the MENA region including the Red Sea and the Gulf, such as the use machine learning models in classification and change detection of marine habitats (e.g. mangrove, coral reefs and salt marshes), time series analysis of ozone and chlorophyll-a optimized by the deep neural networks, as well as transfer learning approaches for precision agriculture.
SPEAKER’S BIO:
Dr. Hesham El-Askary is a Professor of Remote Sensing and Earth System Sciences in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and holds another appointment at the School of Computational Sciences at the Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University. Prof. El-Askary is also a member in the Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling & Observations (CEESMO). He also serves as a Professor of Environmental Sciences and is currently on leave with the Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, Alexandria University, Egypt. Dr. El-Askary served as the academic advisor for the Department of Environmental Science, Alexandria University 2007-2008 and was also elected by the faculty administration to serve as a member of the Quality Assurance Unit (QAU) responsible for applying the Ministry of Higher Education strategies as a component in the accreditation process.
El-Askary has published over a 100 refereed research publications, conferences full paper and book chapters in these research areas. Dr. El-Askary’s research has been supported by NSF, NASA, USDA and EU. Dr. El-Askary has received the Saudi Arabia award hosted by the Arab Administrative Development Organization (ARADO) affiliated with the League of Arab states for the best published article in Environmental Management among 150 articles in 2006. He is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), AGU, EGU, COSPAR, and Phi Beta Delta Honor Society.
