GEO-K

Born in April 2006, GEO-K (GK) is the first spin-off company of the Tor Vergata University, Rome. The mission of GEO-K is to conduct R&D activities and to provide consulting, services and products in the field of image processing and of microwave, optical and hyperspectral remote sensing. GEO-K is the commercial vehicle through which the user-oriented applications based on the scientific know-how developed both by the Tor Vergata University Earth Observation group and in the framework of the Geoinformation PhD Program, are marketed and delivered to public and private customers. The Tor Vergata University Earth Observation group, which presently includes a permanent staff of 4 professors and several contract and scholarship holders, has carried research on active and passive microwave earth observation since almost 25 years and has published over 400 papers on refereed international journals, books and conference proceedings. The group has participated in early international experiments and campaigns (AGRISAR, AGRISCATT, MAESTRO, Mac-Europe, SIR-C/SAR-X, ENVISAT) and is currently involved in the SMOS and CosmoSkyMed missions.
The key-personnel of GEO-K is highly qualified and with long experience in international activities, in particular gained through participation in projects coordinated by the European Space Agency and by the European Commission. During its incubation at the ESA-ESRIN centre GEO-K developed a new technology based on neural networks for the processing of satellite data, with a particular focus on the features extraction procedures.
GEO-K is and has been involved in various educational projects regarding EO, in particular it is actually a partner of the ongoing ESA Learn-EO project. In the ESA DUE Innovators II Apollo (Atmospheric POLLution monitoring with EO) project, ground measurement and EO data have been combined for the production of tropospheric ozone maps while in the Fuegosat Synthesis study GEO-K has been providing, together with University of Valencia, consulting activities to ESA for the definition and the exploitation capabilities of a new TIR space-mission. GEO-K has been also recently involved in contracts with ASI (Italian Space Agency) for the exploitation of the VHR X-band data collected by the CosmoSkymed mission, for the design of new data compression algorithms suitable for space missions, for the implementation of data fusion algorithms to be applied for a precision farming service. The organization of the company system in conformance with the ISO normative has led GEO-K to pass the check to receive the certification ISO 9001:2008 for “Design and development of satellite data processing components for geoinformation production”. The certification has been confirmed and renewed on July 10, 2013. In 2012 GEO-K was successful in the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Masters competition winning, together with SERCO, the ‘Ideas Challenge’ section.
For more information about GEO-K visit www.geo-k.co .

Fabio Del Frate

Fabio Del Frate received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from University of Rome Tor Vergata. He was a Visiting Scientist with the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow with the European Space Agency (ESA) in Frascati, Italy, where he was engaged in projects concerning end to- end remote sensing applications. He is currently an Associate Professor with University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he teaches courses on Remote Sensing and Applied Electromagnetics. He his author or coauthor of more than 100 scientific publications, with a special focus on the use of machine learning algorithms for remote sensing inversion problems and he is Associate Editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. In 2006 he co-founded GEO-K S.r.l., the first spin-off company of University of Tor Vergata of which he is the Technical Director

Michele de Rosa

Michele de Rosa works at GEO-K since 2013 as weather systems engineer and researcher. He received his Master degree in Computer Science at University of Salerno and has obtained the PhD in Environmental Monitoring with a thesis about the nowcasting of extreme weather events using the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite data at “Sapienza“ University of Rome. His recent activities involve climate change topics and the development of a novel thunderstorms detection and tracking system using the MSG data. Furthermore, he is part of the Hydrological SAF (HSAF) at the Italian Meteorological Office. He has a previous working experience as software engineer and project manager of more than 10 years.

Matteo Picchiani

Matteo Picchiani received the Laurea degree in Telecommunication Engineering at Tor Vergata University and he is currently pursuing is PhD in GeoInformation. In 2007, he won a scholarship for a stage at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, were he worked on seismogenetic fault models from SAR data. Since 2007, he has been collaborating with the Earth Observation Laboratory, University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” and from October 2013 he joined GEO-K S.r.l.. His research and development activity is addressed to image processing in remote sensing, with particular interest to neural networks and data fusion algorithms. He is author of peer reviewed international journal papers on features extraction from EO data.

Daniele Latini

Daniele Latini received the Laurea degree in telecommunication engineering from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Rome, in 2010, where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in geoinformation. Since 2010, he has been working in the field of remote sensing with the Earth Observation Laboratory, Tor Vergata, contributing to projects funded by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. He was a Visiting Student Researcher with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. His main research interests are synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing exploiting the potential of new generation satellites (COSMO-SkyMed and TerraSAR-X) using approach based on neural networks, polarimetry, and DInSAR techniques. In 2015 he joined GEO-K as a remote sensing specialist.

Francesco Carbone

Francesco Carbone received his Bachelor Degree in Geographical Sciences at Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna in 2009 and the Master Degree in Management and Development of the Territory at La Sapienza University in Rome in 2012 and a Master in Geoinformation and Geographic Information Systems to support decision making for Sustainable Management of Land and Territorial Security at Tor Vergata University in 2015. He is author of international publications and since 2015 is working with GEO-K as a specialist in using remote sensing data for territorial analysis and urbanization processes monitoring