Saied Pirasteh is the Director of WIDM.Inc (www.widm.ca) Canada. He is also a Senior Scientist and the Assistant Head of the Mobile Mapping Lab at University of Waterloo. His research skills are in multi-disciplinary in applied geology and remote sensing & GIS applications including structural geology, exploration, and tectonic geomorphology, hydrology, watershed basin analysis, environmental issues and climate change, natural resources, natural hazards, and disaster management. He obtained his Bachelor (1998), Master (2000), and PhD in 2004 from Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has supervised 14 PhD and MSc students internationally. He is also pursuing his second PhD in geography and environmental management (Applied LiDAR and Mobile Laser Scanning Systems) at the University of Waterloo. He is author/co-author of more than 150 publications in refereed journals, conference proceedings and books. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Geoinformatics Research and Development Journal (IGRDJ); and the founder of the International Association of Geo-information and Communication Technologies (GeoICT) Ontario, as well as International Conference on Geo-information Technologies for Natural Disaster Management (GiT4NDM). Jonathan Li is professor of geomatics at the Department of Geography and Environmental Management. He holds a Ph.D. degree in geomatics engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2000. Prior to joining the University of Waterloo in 2007, he was on the faculty at Ryerson University and the University of Regina (2000-2006). Professor Li’s research interests lie mainly in the areas of remote sensing and geographical information science. The focus is placed on use of the state-of-the-art Earth observation and mobile mapping systems to derive spatial and attribute information to support effective urban-suburban planning and environmental management activities; to extract geometric information of urban structures for developing theories and models of urban morphology; to detect land use and land cover changes to study spatiotemporal dynamics and consequences of urbanization as a major form of global changes.
