Jan Skaloud receives the Samuel Gamble Award

Jan Skaloud, a senior scientist at EPFL's Geodetic Engineering Laboratory (TOPO), is the 2020 winner of the Samuel Gamble Award. He is being recognized for 25 years of scientific contributions to the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing. Starting in 1988, this award has been granted every four years by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS).

Skaloud, born in Prague in 1969, received his first Master's degree in engineering in his home country. He earned a second Master's in the same field in 1993 at the University of Calgary, Canada, followed by a doctorate. In 1999, he joined EPFL as a postdoctoral researcher in environmental science and engineering. In 2008, he was appointed senior scientist at the TOPO laboratory.

Throughout his career, Skaloud has expanded the frontiers of photogrammetry and remote sensing with navigation sensors. In Canada, he presented the first practical results of airborne direct orientation (ISPRS C., Vienna 1996) while optimizing georeferencing by INS/DGPS (PhD, 1999). In Switzerland, he made advances in the rigorous calibration technique for airborne LiDAR (J. ISPRS 2006) and developed a new methodology for sensor georeferencing in national coordinates (J. ISPRS 2008). He also led the development of a system and techniques for real-time registration of airborne lasers with sub-decimeter accuracy (J. ISPRS 2010) and in-flight quality control (PFG, 2012).

Beginning in 2013, Skaloud pioneered integrated sensor orientation on small micro aerial vehicles for mapping with centimeter-level accuracy without ground control (PFG 2014, Hansa Luftbild Prize). In this field, he was the co-recipient of the 2016-2019 Helava Award for his development of bundle adjustment with raw inertial observation (J ISPRS 2017). He shared the Karl Kraus Medal for his contribution to the textbook on Airborne and Terrestrial Laser Scanning (2012).

Over the last 20 years, Skaloud has contributed to various ISPRS and EuroSDR activities. Since 2008 he has chaired the ISPRS working group that organizes EuroCOW meetings (ISPRS, EuroSDR), for which he has served as the primary organizer since 2016. His other research activities are related to geodesy (IAG Fellow 2019) and navigation (ION-US/CH).

The award ceremony was scheduled to take place at the ISPRS's Congress in Nice in June 2020. This year, due to the pandemic, the announcement will be made online. The Congress has been postponed until July 2021.