Rate My Professor Norman Kerle

Prof. Dr. Norman Kerle is Full Professor of Geoinformatics for Disaster Risk Management in the Earth Systems Analysis department of the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente. He holds Master's degrees in geography from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and the Ohio State University, USA, and a PhD in geography with a focus on volcano remote sensing from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2002. His career began with volcanology project work in Costa Rica in 1994 and disaster research in the Philippines in 1996. He developed expertise in remote sensing during a project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1997 and led a multi-national project in Nicaragua from 1998 to 2001. Since joining the University of Twente in 2002, he progressed to Associate Professor in 2012 and Full Professor in 2022, delivering his inaugural lecture titled 'It takes a village: technology and society in crisis response' in October 2022. Kerle leads the ITC object-based image analysis research group and coordinates contributions to several EU-funded projects, including FP7 RECONASS and INACHUS, and H2020 PANOPTIS and INGENIOUS.

Kerle's research specializes in remote sensing for hazards, risk, and disaster damage assessment using multi-type geodata, including UAV-based structural damage mapping, collaborative image-based damage mapping, landslide detection, and post-disaster recovery assessment combining remote sensing and macro-economic agent-based modeling. He chaired the GEOBIA 2016 conference hosted by the University of Twente/ITC and serves as Associate Editor for Remote Sensing (MDPI) and Editor for Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences. Key publications include "Object-oriented mapping of landslides using Random Forests" (Remote Sensing of Environment, 2011), "Lite-mono: A lightweight CNN and transformer architecture for self-supervised monocular depth estimation" (CVPR, 2023), and "Characterising spectral, spatial and morphometric properties of landslides for semi-automatic detection using object-oriented methods" (Geomorphology, 2010). He received the 2011 Lloyd's Science of Risk prize in the Natural Hazards category. Kerle teaches courses in advanced image analysis, quantitative remote sensing, and spatial data for disaster risk management, and supervises MSc and PhD students.