Rate My Professor Jan D. Wegner

Prof. Dr. Jan Dirk Wegner holds the Data Science for Sciences chair as an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning at the University of Zurich, where he also heads the EcoVision Lab. He completed his PhD with distinction at Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2011. His career includes a postdoctoral position from 2012 to 2016 and senior scientist role from 2017 to 2020 in the Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing group at ETH Zurich, where he was supported by an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship. Wegner's research specializes in machine learning, computer vision, and remote sensing to tackle environmental and geoscientific challenges, including emissions tracking, biodiversity monitoring, deforestation detection, invasive species identification, urban green space analysis, and conflict damage assessment using satellite, aerial drone, and street-view data. The EcoVision Lab, with seven members including five PhD students, leads projects such as STEPS for satellite-based CO2 and NOx emissions quantification, Neophytes-Radar for invasive plant detection, and global vegetation monitoring in collaboration with partners like Empa, WSL, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Wegner's influential publications include Semantic3D.net: A New Large-Scale Point Cloud Classification Benchmark (Hackel et al., 2017), A High-Resolution Canopy Height Model of the Earth (Lang et al., 2023), The Perfect Match: 3D Point Cloud Matching with Smoothed Densities (Gojcic et al., 2019), Classification with an Edge: Improving Semantic Image Segmentation with Boundary Detection (Marmanis et al., 2018), and Fast Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds with Strongly Varying Density (Hackel et al., 2016). He has earned the Science Award of the German Geodetic Commission and selection to the World Economic Forum Young Scientist Class 2020 as one of 25 top researchers under 40. Wegner serves as Vice-President of ISPRS Technical Commission II, associated faculty of the ETH AI Center, ELLIS member, director of the University of Zurich's PhD Graduate School in Data Science, and co-chair of CVPR EarthVision workshops, significantly impacting geospatial AI and environmental monitoring fields.