Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

International Center for Remote Sensing Education, Inc.

Mission Statement The International Center for Remote Sensing Education, Inc.(ICRSED) was established in 1999 to provide leadership in the application and technical transfer of appropriate spatial data and information technology to the professional workforce and education community. This mission was borne of the desire to harness NASA'S and other nation's Earth Observation data for improved understanding and management of the Earth's systems.

ICRSED's focus has been to assist schools, government agencies, and corporations in consolidating myriad technical information and expert human resources. ICRSED provides the highest quality educational support resources to a community of users at various levels of need. The Digital Earth Vision is the hallmark for using the most advanced digital-spatial methods of the Internet and computing industry to deliver and update these educational and ma

An international community of education, business and government, and community institutions have benefited from the ICRSED web-based educational resources. ICRSED is dedicated to pursing the application of spatial information systems technology to promote and enhance community-based decision support with goals of sustainability and improvement of human well-being.

ICRSED is a not-for-profit corporation, registered as a 501 c (3) in the state of Maryland.

Professor Tim Foresman is a senior Science, Engineering, and Education leader. He has been active in helping organizations across the globe reach their full potential and address the challenging issues of better stewardship for managing human and ecological resources while focusing on goals for sustainable and higher living standards.

He served under Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the United Nations’ chief environmental scientist with the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya. He also served at NASA Headquarters as the national manager for the Digital Earth Initiative under Vice President Al Gore, which led to many developments, including Google Earth. He is a founding member of the International Society for Digital Earth.

Tim is a steadfast advocate for the use of scientific and disruptive visualization technology and spatial information systems (Earth Observation, GIS, Big Data Analytics, and Virtual Reality) and using these advances for engaging citizens through crowdsourcing and social media to innovate community decision support and digital democracy. He recently served as the SIBA Chair in Spatial Information at Queensland University of Technology in Australia where he lead a coalition of economic, academic, government, and community organisations targeting the integration of advanced technologies towards better engineering, planning, clean energy and creative operations for a prosperous and sustainable future