Education in the following broad range of future employment options is envisaged:
• Remote sensing, with emphasis on satellite Earth observation.
• Surveillance, communication, and navigation, particularly in airport and air traffic.
• Acquisition, processing and management of geographic and environmental data.
• Architecture and elements of remote sensing, positioning, communication and medical imaging systems, and effects of the operational environment on their performance.

The GeoInformation educational programme is essentially tailored to overcome the disciplinary fragmentation that often hinders PhD graduates in adapting to the demands of non-academic work. It aims at substantially increasing the information available, the potential versatility of the students, and the career options afforded to them by their PhD education. Off-campus internships in other countries, research organizations or companies can lead to additional skills and exposure to authentic job situations, thus preparing the PhD students for possible continuous changes, which have become a central feature of contemporary professional life in the field of advanced technology.

In this frame, specific skills will be supplied in the rapidly growing and evolving fields of: Earth observation from aerospace platforms, global monitoring and environmental applications; positioning and navigation systems, control and management of air, sea and terrestrial traffic; radio frequency components and systems which interact with the natural or man-made environment; systems for acquisition, processing and distribution of geographical, geo-referenced or environmental data;
electromagnetic modelling in microwave and optical absorption, scattering and emission; retrieval of bio-geo-physical information from remote and indirect measurements. The envisaged applications include: land use, urban changes, digital cartography; precision farming, forestry; renewable energy resources; meteorology; atmospheric, sea and land pollution; natural risk assessment and emergency management; airport surface movements guidance and control; radar and radiometric systems; innovative antennas; medical imaging.

Given the multi-disciplinary educational environment, also including both basic research and applications, the experience gained by the GeoInformation PhD students will contribute to their ability to adapt to changing employment scenarios, to communicate complex ideas to non specialists and to work well in teams at end-to-end projects. The partially nonacademic education will foster in the PhD recipients the aptitude to disseminate advanced knowledge to manufacturing and service companies and will hopefully stimulate some of them to start a hi-tech new company.

The members of the GeoInformation PhD faculty have connections with many Italian and foreign organizations with which a number of international projects have been and are being carried out. The agreement between Tor Vergata University and the European Space Agency provides the PhD students with opportunities of interaction with a quite advanced scientific and operational international environment. Further agreements have been stipulated with several European and U.S. organizations, thus broadening the range of opportunities to visit laboratories where cutting edge research is conducted. Reciprocally, student from other countries (Argentina, Indonesia, Spain, …) visit Tor Vergata or are enrolled in the GeoInformation programme. In spite of its nontraditional educational and disciplinary approach and its recent institution (in the academic year 2000-2001), an average of about 7 students have enrolled each year. Since 2004, 8 students have received their PhD, while 32 students are presently (2006) active. About half of the 23 scholarships granted to GeoInformation since its beginning have been contributed by external organizations.

Research projects

A list of projects carried out within GeoInformation can be suggestive of the research opportunities the PhD students encounter and of the variety of careers they are being prepared for.

• Innovative signal processing in earth surface and moving objects imaging by Synthetic Aperture Radar.
• Radar polarimetry for land use, change detection and parameter estimation in urban environments, forests, agricultural areas and humid zones.
• SAR interferometry for DEM generation, landslide surveillance, tectonic faults characterization and seismic risk assessment, glacier monitoring (in cooperation with the Technical University of Denmark).
• Advanced computational tools for very-high resolution radar and optical images and for hyper spectral images in precision farming, urban dynamics and building characterization (in cooperation with the University of Colorado at Boulder and the European Space Agency).
• Modelling microwave backscattering, bistatic scattering, and emissivity, with applications to soil moisture, crop and forest monitoring, also in support to the SMOS mission (in cooperation with the European Space Agency, l’Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and the United States Department of Agriculture).
• New computational tools based on artificial intelligence to detect and monitor oil spills (in cooperation with industry).
• Monitoring atmospheric and tropospheric ozone (in cooperation with the European Space Agency and the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace).
• Satellite precipitation monitoring (in cooperation with the National Research Council).
• Submarine instability phenomena on the flanks of volcanic islands (in cooperation with the National Research Council and industry).
• Airport surface movements guidance and control by multilateration (in cooperation with industry).
• Ultra-wideband antennas, naval antennas and their interaction with the ship environment (in cooperation with industry).

Courses and seminars.

Graduate courses are offered on: Remote Sensing, Satellite Monitoring, Topography, Urban Analysis, Neural Networks, Scattering from Soil and Vegetation, Sea Surface Observation.

Cycles of GeoInformation seminars are given by Italian and international experts, especially from the European Space Agency and in cooperation with the IEEE Geosciences and Remote Sensing Society.