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June 2017
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
The Photogrammetric Fairchild Award
Lewis Graham
Graham began his career in photogrammetry in the mid
1980’s by leading the development of the Monoscopic Ex-
traction Workstation, an advanced digital photogrammetry
hardware/software system developed for the Defense Map-
ping Agency’s Mark 90 modernization program. In the early
1990’s he was the principle architect of the Image Pipe image
processing system, the first multi-processor software imple-
mentation of the IDEX image processing chain. The Image
Pipe was used as the core processing system for Intergraph’s
ImageStation Z, an advanced commercial photogrammetric
software system based on the then new operating system,
Windows NT. In the latter half of the 1990’s, Graham was
the founding CEO of Z/I Imaging, an Intergraph-Carl Zeiss
joint venture global photogrammetry hardware and soft-
ware company. There he led the development of the Digital
Mapping Camera (DMC), the world’s first commercial large
format digital aerial framing camera. Following Z/I Imag-
ing, Graham formed the GeoCue Group where he has led the
development of advanced workflow coordination software for
photogrammetric and LIDAR production systems. His latest
adventures have been in developing hardware and software
technologies for improving the accuracy of photogrammetric
mapping drones.
Purpose:
The Photogrammetric Fairchild Award is designed
to stimulate the development of the art of aerial photogram-
metry in the United States. Practicability is the essence of
the Award and is the basis for the review of all candidates.
Donor
: The ASPRS Foundation and Lockheed Martin
The award consists of a silver presentation plaque mounted
on a walnut wood panel and an engraved plaque.
ASPRS Outstanding Technical Achievement
Award (OTAA)
Google Earth Engine Team
Developers: Rebecca Moore, Matt Hancher, Noel
Gorelick, Mike Dixon, Simon Ilyushchenko, and David
Thau
Google Earth Engine History In 2009, Rebecca Moore, Matt
Hancher, and Noel Gorelick began work on
with the initial goal of addressing global deforestation
by building a platform for planetary-scale imagery analysis.
From this prototype, a larger team including the original
three and Mike Dixon, Simon Ilyushchenko, and David Thau
continued the development which is still ongoing today.
Google Earth Engine was first introduced to the world at
COP16 in Cancun in 2010, and today has more than 30,000
users in 165 countries.
Google Earth Engine has primarily been used by scien-
tists and researchers developing algorithms for imagery and
geospatial analysis through the use of the Earth Engine
More than 100 scientific journal articles have been
published applying Earth Engine across a wide variety of dis-
ciplines, from mapping and measuring global forest change
and global surface water change to estimating evapotranspi-
ration, agricultural crop yields, urban extent, sea-level rise
impacts, biodiversity habitat suitability, earthquake and
malaria risk.
Google Earth Engine (GEE) also powers a growing num-
ber of operational real-world web applications (such as
,
,
,
which tackle global challenges from sustainable
management of natural resources to helping vulnerable com-
munities adapt under a changing climate. GEE is unique in
that it is constantly evolving and improving as Google as well
as users add functionality as necessary to solve real world
problems.
The scale of the platform is illustrated by Earth Engine’s
feature, which puts three decades of planetary
change into the hands of everyone around the world. Its
construction required sifting thru more than 5 million Land-
sat and Sentinel satellite images, using more than 4 million
hours of computation to distill 3 quadrillion pixels into the
interactive
Timelapse
dataset. A task which would have tak-
en hundreds of years on a single computer was completed in
several days on Earth Engine.
By co-locating multi-petabyte, continually-updating data
archives with massive computational resources in the Google
cloud, accessible from an ordinary web browser, Google Earth
Engine has radically changed the way that earth observing
imagery is viewed and analyzed, opening up the opportunity
to quickly and effectively make use of cloud processing for all.
(L-r) Lewis Graham and Charles Toth.
(L-r) Cliff Greve (award donor), Simon (Vsevolod) ilyushchenko, David
Thau, Rebecca Moore, Matthew Hancher, Michael Dixon, Noel
Gorelick, Charles Toth.
Awards & Scholarships
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