Welcome! I am General Director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) for the period 2005 to 2011. Here is my vision for INPE.
During my time as director, INPE´s budget went from US$ 90 million in 2004 to US$ 250 million in 2010. My achievements include: (a) a long-term strategic plan for INPE; (b) an open access policy for INPE's data and products; (c) cooperation in satellite projects with China and USA; (d) major increases in contracts with Brazilian industries; (e) big improvements in monitoring deforestation in Amazonia; (f) a new Centre for Earth System Science; (g) a new supercomputer for weather and climate prediction; (h) a new research program in Space Weather; (i) a new Centre for Space Research in Amazonia.
My research areas are Geoinformatics and Environmental Modelling. I serve on the editorial board of the journals Earth Science Informatics, Journal of Spatial Information Science and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. I am a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). I was a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of Global Land Project from 2006 to 2011. I received a Dr. Honoris Causa from the University of Muenster (Germany) and I am a fellow of the Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente (Netherlands). According to Google Scholar, my h-index is 25 and my number of citations is over 4000, as of July 2010. Here is my research vision and a recent lecture on modelling human-environment interactions.
Our team at INPE develops free software, including: SPRING, a free object-oriented GIS, TerraLib, an open source GIS library, TerraME, a tool for spatial modelling in cell spaces, TerraHS, a Haskell GIS programming enviroment, and GeoDMA, a geographical data mining program.
Contact email: gilberto.camara ( at ) inpe.br.
