Rate My Professor Curt Davis

Curt Davis is the F. Robert and Patricia Naka Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He serves as the founding and current director of the university's Center for Geospatial Intelligence, an interdisciplinary center that conducts research, development, and training in geospatial intelligence to support national security, homeland defense, and military combat operations. Davis earned his PhD and BS degrees from the University of Kansas. Throughout his career at the University of Missouri, he has led efforts in advancing technologies for geospatial analysis, with research funded by civilian and defense agencies including NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Army, as well as industry partners such as Boeing, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Northrop Grumman.

His primary research specializations encompass geospatial intelligence, image processing, and satellite remote sensing. Under Davis's direction, the Center for Geospatial Intelligence has secured more than $50 million in federal grants and contracts from organizations including the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, U.S. Army, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Air Force Research Laboratory, and DARPA. Key research areas include satellite, airborne, and ground-based remote sensing systems; artificial intelligence and machine learning; data science; automated target detection and recognition; UAV systems and sensor processing; pattern recognition; data mining and information retrieval; and high-performance computing for geospatial data analytics. Davis has published extensively in leading journals, with notable works such as "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" (Nature Geoscience, 2008), "Snowfall-driven growth in East Antarctic ice sheet mitigates recent sea-level rise" (Science, 2005), "Training deep convolutional neural networks for land–cover classification of high-resolution imagery" (IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 2017), "A combined fuzzy pixel-based and object-based approach for classification of high-resolution multispectral data over urban areas" (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2003), and "A robust threshold retracking algorithm for measuring ice-sheet surface elevation change from satellite radar altimeters" (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2002). He is listed among the top 2% of scientists in the world. Davis's leadership has positioned the Center for Geospatial Intelligence as the leading academic research center in geospatial intelligence for U.S. national security.