Nico Lang

Nico Lang

Asst. Prof. at the University of Copenhagen / Pioneer Centre for AI. PhD from ETH Zurich.

About

My name is Nico Lang and I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Earth Observation Data at the University of Copenhagen, associated with the Global Wetland Centre and the Pioneer Centre for AI. I joined the Climate AI Nordics network as a core member and I am involved in several community efforts like the FGVC workshop at CVPR or the SSL4EO-2024 summer school. Before moving to Denmark for a Postdoc advised by Serge Belongie and Christian Igel, I received a PhD from ETH Zurich supervised by Konrad Schindler and Jan Dirk Wegner.

[Curriculum Vitae] [Headshot] [Bio]

Research
My research interests are in the area of computer vision, machine learning, and remote sensing and in developing new methods using these techniques to support environmental sciences. My PhD research focused on advancing the way we measure forest structure at global scales using publicly available satellite data. My interests also include uncertainty estimation in deep learning, anomaly detection, and learning from imbalanced data, as these are omnipresent challenges that arise when working on real-world problems. I see great potential in the application of machine learning to address global environmental issues.

Studies
During my Bachelor’s degree in Geomatics and Planning at ETH Zurich, I discovered my fascination for machine learning and computer vision in the context of geospatial data science. Before continuing with my Master in Geomatics at ETH Zurich, I started an internship in computer vision at upicto, a start-up from the Computer Vision Lab at ETH, and continued it at Logitech, as upicto was acquired during my time there.

Collaborations
Following the work started during an early academic visit to Prof. Pietro Perona’s Computational Vision Lab at Caltech, I worked on deep learning approaches to monitor urban trees from street-level images. During my Phd I’ve had the chance to collaborate with the NASA GEDI mission, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, as well as with companies and institutions outside academia: Barry Callebaut, High carbon stock Approach (HCSA), Hunziker, Zarn und Partner (HZP), and MeteoSwiss.

Leisure
I enjoy spending my free time outdoors hiking and snowboarding, playing volleyball, and traveling where windy takes me kitesurfing. I play the drums and like making music with others.

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