Dr. Sergii Skakun is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment at the Department of Geographical Sciences and the College of Information Studies (iSchool). He joined UMD in October 2015. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Senior Engineer at Samsung SDI (South Korea), where he was responsible for developing industrial vision inspection systems. From 2006 to 2013, he has held multiple positions (latest Senior Scientist) at the Space Research Institute (Ukraine), where he was performing research in remote sensing. He received PhD in Computer Science from National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2005.
Dr. Skakun has participated as a PI or Co-I in projects funded by NASA, NSF, Google, European Commission (EC), EC Joint Research Center (JRC), U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation (CRDF), National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, State Space Agency of Ukraine and Science & Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU).
He is a two-time recipient as a PI of the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) projects "Agriculture Velocity of Winter Wheat" (2022-2025, Leonid Shumilo) and "Climate induced agriculture change hotspots and its implication to global food security in the former Soviet Union (Russia and Ukraine)" (2021-2024, Abdul Qadir).
His recent projects include "Artillery Craters and Unexploded Ordnance Mapping in Ukraine using High Resolution Satellite Imagery" (NASA, 2023-2024), "High-Impact Hot Spots of Land Cover Land Use Change: Ukraine and Neighboring Countries" (NASA, 2021-2023), "FAI: Advancing Deep Learning Towards Spatial Fairness" (NSF, 2022-2025) and "Maintenance and refinement of the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS Land Surface Reflectance product suite" (NASA, 2021-2024).
Within Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), he is co-leading a Cloud Masking Inter-comparison Exercise (CMIX, https://calvalportal.ceos.org/cmix). He is currently an Associate Editor for the journal Remote Sensing of Environment. As of now, he authored or co-authored >70 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 3 books (in Ukrainian/Russian), and 6 chapters in edited books.
He is teaching the following courses: GEOG461 “Machine Learning for Computational Earth Observation Science (CEOS)”, INST156 “How NASA Sees the Earth” (GenEd course), GEOG371 “Programming for Image Analysis”, GEOG272 "Remote Sensing".
His current research focus is to advance methods, models and emerging technologies in the area of data science for heterogeneous remote sensing data fusion, processing and analysis, and their applications to Earth System Science and areas of societal benefit.
Areas of Interest
- Remote sensing
- Agricultural monitoring
- Machine learning in remote sensing
- Disaster monitoring and risk assessment
Degrees
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Degree TypePhDDegree DetailsComputer Science, Space Research Institute NASU-SSAU (Ukraine), 2005
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Degree TypeMSDegree DetailsApplied Mathematics, National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, 2004
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Degree TypeBSDegree DetailsApplied Mathematics, National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, 2002
| Course Name | Course Title | Semester | Syllabus |
|---|---|---|---|
| GEOG271 | Introduction to Earth Observation Science | Spring 2018 | Syllabus |
Ongoing projects (PI or UMD PI):
| 2023-2024 | PI for the NASA Rapid Response project “Artillery Craters and Unexploded Ordnance Mapping in Ukraine using High Resolution Satellite Imagery” |
| 2022 – 2025 | PI for the NASA project “Agriculture Velocity of Winter Wheat” within Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST). FI: Leonid Shumilo (graduate student) |
| 2022 – 2025 | Co-PI for the NSF project “FAI: Advancing Deep Learning Towards Spatial Fairness” (NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon). PI: X. Jia (University of Pittsburgh), Co-PI: Y. Xie (UMD) |
| 2021-2024 | UMD PI for the NASA project “Maintenance and refinement of the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 VIIRS Land Surface Reflectance product suite”. PI: E. Vermote (NASA/GSFC) |
| 2021 – 2024 | PI the NASA project “Climate induced agriculture change hotspots and its implication to global food security in the former Soviet Union (Russia and Ukraine)” within Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) FI: Abdul Qadir (graduate student) |
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2021 – 2023 |
PI for the NASA project “High-Impact Hot Spots of Land Cover Land Use Change: Ukraine and Neighboring Countries” |
Completed projects:
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2019 – 2022 |
UMD PI for the NASA project “Integration of L-band, C-band, and optical observations for agricultural monitoring” |
| 2021 – 2022 | UMD PI for the IARPA/NGA project “WATCH: Wide Area Terrestrial Change Hypercube” PI: M. Leotta (Kitware) |
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ProfessionalAssociate Editor, journal Remote Sensing of Environment
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ProfessionalEditorial Board Member, section “Remote Sensing Image Processing”, journal Remote Sensing
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InternationalTask Coordinator of the Cloud Masking Inter-comparison eXercise (CMIX) within CEOS WGCV
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CampusRemote Sensing Teaching Team Lead
Current Students
Former Students
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Andres Eduardo Santamaria ArtigasPostDoc at UMD
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José Luis VillaescusaEUMETSAT
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Gasmine Myers
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Meredith BrownPostDoc at Sandia National Laboratories
Related Students (Listed by Student on Student's Profile)
- Christian Abys
- Katherine Melocik
- Gasmine Myers
- Abdul Qadir
- Leonid Shumilo
- Yiming Zhang
