
Prof. Antonio J. Plaza
Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS)
President, Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)
Head of the Hyperspectral Computing Laboratory (HyperComp)
HyperComp Activities (pdf) - Detailed CV (pdf) - Google Scholar Profile (html)
Associate Professor (with accreditation for Full Professor) /
Profesor Titular de Universidad (acreditado como Catedrático de Universidad)
Department of Technology of Computers and Communications
Escuela Politécnica de Cáceres, University of Extremadura / Universidad de Extremadura (UEX)
Avda. de la Universidad S/N, E-10003 Cáceres (SPAIN)
Phone: +34 927 257 000 (Dial extension 51662 during voice message)
E-mail: aplaza@unex.es

Bio and research interests. Antonio J. Plaza was
born in Caceres, SPAIN, in 1975. He received the Computer Engineer
degree in 1997, the M.Sc. degree in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in
2002, all in Computer Engineering. Dr. Plaza is currently an
Associate Professor (with accreditation for Full Professor) with the
Department of Technology of Computers and Communications, University
of Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain. He has authored or
co-authored more than 370 publications, including more
than 100 journal citation report (JCR) papers (60 of them published
in IEEE journals and 50 of them published since January
2011), 20 book chapters, and over 250 peer-reviewed
international conference papers (94 of them published in IEEE
conferences and over 60 of them published in SPIE conferences). He
is a highly cited author with more than 3800 citations to his
published papers according to Google
Scholar. His main research interests comprise remotely sensed
hyperspectral image analysis, signal processing, and efficient
implementations of large-scale scientific problems on high
performance computing architectures, including commodity Beowulf
clusters, heterogeneous networks of computers and grids, and
specialized computer architectures such as field-programmable gate
arrays (FPGAs) or graphical processing units (GPUs).
Visiting researcher/professor positions. Dr. Plaza has been visiting researcher/professor at several institutions, including the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; the Remote Sensing, Signal and Image Processing Laboratory (RSSIPL) at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the Microsystems Laboratory at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP); the AVIRIS group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; the Telecommunications & Remote Sensing Laboratory, University of Pavia, Italy; and with the GIPSA-lab, Grenoble Images Parole Signal Automatique, France.
Editorial activities. Dr. Plaza is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing journal (appointed for three years, starting in January 2013). He was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2007-2012; Area: hyperspectral image analysis and signal processing). He also served as an Associate Editor on Education for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Newsletter. He was a member of the steering committee of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. He is currently an Associate editor for IEEE Access, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, and the Journal of Real-Time Image Processing. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Spanish Remote Sensing journal. He has edited a book on High-Performance Computing in Remote Sensing for CRC Press/Taylor and Francis. He has guest-edited seven special issues on remotely sensed data processing for different JCR journals.
International and national research projects. Dr. Plaza was the project coordinator of the Hyperspectral Imaging Network (Hyper-I-Net), a four-year Marie Curie Research Training Network (total budget: 2.800.000 Euro) designed to build an interdisciplinary European research community focused on hyperspectral imaging activities. He is also a member of the Management Committee and coordinator of a working group on Applications of Hierarchical-Heterogeneous Systems in the Open European Network for High Performance Computing on Complex Environments (ComplexHPC), funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme. He is also a partner of the Marie Curie Action for International Research Staff Exchange Tools for Open Multi-Risk Assessment Using Earth Observation Data (TOLOMEO) which involves cooperation between several Universities in Europe and South-America. He is also a partner of the HOST project (total budget: 2.226.268 Euro) funded under the capacities research potential (REGPOT) programme of the European Commission. He also coordinates three national projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation on fundamental research and infrastructures and participates in relevant research networks at the Spanish level, such as CAPAP-H and PRISMA.
Involvement
in technical societies. Dr. Plaza is a Senior Member of
IEEE. He is a member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom)
of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) since 2011, and was appointed
international Director
of Education for GRSS (2011-2012). He was recently
elected as the President of the Spanish Chapter of GRSS. He is also
a member of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) and the International
Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).
He
is affiliated to the Technical Committee on Data Fusion (TCDF) of
IEEE GRSS, and to several Technical Committees of IEEE CS, including
those on parallel processing (TCPP), computer architecture (TCCA),
distributed processing (TCDP), and scalable computing (TCSC).
Distinctions
and awards. Dr. Plaza is a recipient of the recognition
of Best
Reviewers of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote
Sensing journal in 2010. He is a recipient of the
recognition of Best
Reviewers of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
journal in 2009. He is a co-author of the 2011 Best Student
Paper at the International Conference on Space Technology, entitled
FPGA Design of the N-FINDR
Algorithm for Spaceborne Hyperspectral Missions.
He received the Top Cited Article award of Elsevier's Journal
of Parallel and Distributed Computing (in 2005-2010) for the
contribution entitled Commodity Cluster-Based Parallel Processing of Hyperspectral Imagery. He
is a recipient of the 2008 Best Paper award at the IEEE Symposium on
Signal Processing and Information Technology, for the
contribution entitled Morphological Feature Extraction and
Spectral Unmixing of Hyperspectral Images. He is a
recipient of the Best Ph.D. Dissertation award at
University of Extremadura in 2002. He was a keynote speaker in the IEEE
Tyrrhenian Worskshop 2012 on Advances in Radar and Remote Sensing
and will be a keynote speaker in the Fifth
IEEE Workshop on Hypers
Participation
in educational activities. Dr. Plaza served as
Director of Education of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Society (2011-2012). He was the general chair of the First Hyper-I-Net School on
Hyperspectral Imaging held in Cáceres, Spain, in
October 2007, and co-organizer of the Second
Hyper-I-Net
School on Earth Science and Applications using Imaging
Spectroscopy held in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in
September 2008, the Third Hyper-I-Net Summer School on
Hyperspectral Data: From Images to Processing held in
Pavia, Italy, in September 2009, and the Fourth
Hyper-I-Net
Summer School on Hyperspectral Imaging held in DLR
Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, in September 2010. He was the chair of a
special invited session on Hyperspectral
Imaging
Training at the IEEE International Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Barcelona, Spain, 2007. He served
as one of the main lecturers of the International
Summer
School on Very High Resolution Remote Sensing
held in Grenoble, France, in September 2008. He has also one of the
main lecturers of the International Summer School on Data
Fusion and High-Performance Computing Onboard Aircrafts,
held in the University of Pavia in September 2011, and will be one
of the main lecturers of the International Summer School on Data
Fusion and Target Detection from Airborne and Spaceborne data that
will be held in the University of Pavia in September 2012.
He taught (with Q. Du) a tutorial on Spectral
Unmixing of Hyperspectral Data at
the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium
(IGARSS), Honolulu, Hawaii, July 2010. He also
taught (with Q. Du) a tutorial on Recent
Advances in Spectral Unmixing of Hyperspectral Data at
the
IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS),
Vancouver, Canada, July 2011, and a tutorial on Spectral
Unmixing of Hyperspectral Data at
the 4th IEEE Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal
Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing, Shanghai,
China, June 2012. He taught (with Q. Du) a tutorial on Recent
Advances
in Hyperspectral Data Analysis at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Symposium (IGARSS), Munich, Germany, July 2012. He
is vice-chair and one of the main organizers of the First
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Summer School (RSSS12)
held in conjunction with IGARSS 2012 in Munich, Germany.
Organization
of International Conferences and Symposia. Dr. Plaza was
the General Chair (with J. Bioucas-Dias) of the Third
IEEE Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing:
Evolution in Remote Sensing (Whispers'2011) held in
Lisbon, Portugal, in June 2011. Dr. Plaza is also a Chair
of three yearly conferences held in USA, Europe and Asia,
respectively: SPIE
Conference on Satellite Data Compression, Communication and
Processing, part of SPIE Optics and Photonics,
San Diego, California (2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012); SPIE Conference on High Performance Computing in Remote
Sensing, part of SPIE
Remote Sensing Europe (started in 2011 in
Prague, Czech Republic and continued on 2012 in Edimburgh, United
Kingdom); IEEE International Workshop on
Parallel and Distributed Computing in Remote Sensing,
part of the IEEE International Conference on
Parallel and Distributed Systems (started in 2011 in
Tainan, Taiwan). He also organized a Special
Session on Pattern Recognition Applications in Remotely Sensed
Hyperspectral Image Analysis at the International
Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM
2012). Dr. Plaza chaired (with Q. Du and Y.-L. Chang) a special
invited session on High Performance Computing for Hyperspectral
Image Analysis at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), Cape Town, South Africa, July 2009, and
also chaired (with Q. Du and J. Bioucas-Dias) a special invited
session on Recent Advances in Spectral Mixture Analysis of
Hyperspectral Data at the First IEEE GRSS Workshop on Hyperspectral
Image and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS),
Grenoble, France, August 2009. He chaired (with M. Parente) a
special invited session on Statistical
versus
Geometrical Spectral Unmixing at the Second IEEE GRSS WHISPERS, Iceland, June 2010.
He chaired a special invited session on Spectral
Unmixing
of Hyperspectral Data at the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing
Symposium (IGARSS), Vancouver, Canada, July 2011. He has been a
member of the Technical Program Committee and chaired sessions for
more than 40 international conferences and symposia.
Proposal evaluation and reviewing activities. Dr. Plaza has served as a proposal evaluator for the European Commission (Marie Curie Actions, Engineering Panel, FP7), the European Space Agency, the Belgium Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the Italian Science Foundation, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, in which he has actively participated in the evaluation of projects in different calls, such as the projects on fundamental research (more than 80 proposals evaluated in 2011-2013) and mobility actions such as the Juan de la Cierva, Ramón y Cajal and José Castillejo programmes. He has reviewed more than 400 manuscripts for over 40 different journals, including the following ones:
Last
update: May 2013