Dr Oktay Karakuş received his BSc degree in electronics engineering (with Honours) from Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey in 2009. Then, he received his MSc and PhD degrees in electronics and communication engineering from İzmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH), Turkey, in 2012 and 2018, respectively. Between October 2009 to January 2018, he was associated with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in Yaşar University, Turkey and the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey as a Research Assistant. He was a Visiting Scholar with the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI-CNR), Pisa, Italy in 2017. Since March 2018, He is working as a Research Associate in image processing at the Visual Information Laboratory at the University of Bristol, Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering.
His research interests span Engineering, Statistics and Computer Science, and specifically are focused on Bayesian statistical signal and image processing, computational methods for remote sensing and medical imagery, MCMC methods, convex/non-convex optimisation, nonlinear time series analysis, and inverse problems. He has co-authored over 30 scientific publications and a member of IEEE and IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has been awarded the IEEE Turkey PhD Thesis Award in December 2020.
Dr Igor Rizaev received his M.Sc. degree (with Honours) in geoinformatics engineering and his PhD degree in geosciences from the Kuban State University, Krasnodar, Russia, in 2007 and 2010, respectively. He has expertise in the geoengineering industry (photogrammetry, laser scanning), having followed a series of technical courses in the field of remote sensing and engineering/surveying with the world’s leading geospatial engineering companies (including Leica Geosystems, Optech Inc. and Terrasolid Ltd.). During this time, he went from being a software engineer to a team leader. He became a Lecturer in 2014 and progressed to Senior Lecturer in 2016 with the Department of Geoinformatics, Kuban State University, Krasnodar, Russia. In 2017 and 2018, he was a visiting scientist at the Centre for Landscape and Climate Research, University of Leicester, U.K. He is currently a Research Associate in mathematical modelling with the Visual Information Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, U.K. His research interests are in remote sensing, spatial statistics, image processing and geospatial engineering areas with the application of SAR, LiDAR, multispectral and thermal imaging in geosciences.
Dr Odysseas Pappas received his MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Bristol in 2012, and his PhD in Communications in 2017 as a member of the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Communications, under the supervision of Professor Dave Bull and Professor Alin Achim of the Bristol Visual Information Laboratory. He has served in AssenSAR between January 2018 and December 2019.