National technical university of Ukraine “Kyiv polytechnic institute” won research grant Google Earth Engine Research Award 2016 and became the first university of Ukraine that shared the initiative of Google Company (Alphabet). The grant winners were professor, Doctor of Engineering Science A. Yu. Shelestov (PTI, NTUU “KPI”) and PhD S. V. Skakun (The University of Maryland, USA).
Prof. Shelestov and his team received the award for the project devoted to land cover mapping for big areas with use of optical and SAR data on the basis of Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform.
According to prof. Shelestov, “over the last years there has been free satellite data of high resolution with large computational and disk resources being necessary for its processing and storage and GEE platform enables scientists, who work in the field of Earth research, use powerful cloud-based platform Google. The task to generate a map of Earth’s surface is one with the highest priority in a new 10-year action plan of Earth research group GEO and is a perspective line of research that will enable to raise international scientific activity of NTUU “KPI” at a fundamentally new level”.
Google Earth Engine Research Awards are given by leading universities of the world (among the winners of the last years - mainly such rating universities of USA as Stanford University, Yale University, The University of Maryland and some European higher educational establishments) by means of independent internal expert assessment and are designed for new technologies of satellite data processing and products receipt.
Although the GEE teams assign plenty of resources for internal research and development, they try to maintain close contacts with academic institutions worldwide, directing innovative research in key areas according to their tasks. This Google initiative is directed towards recognizing and support for world class developments on the basis of universities in the field of Earth research.