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Manu Tom

Photo of Manu Tom

Address:

4800 Oak Grove Drive

Mail Stop: 300-331

Pasadena, CA 91109

Curriculum Vitae:

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Member of:

Water & Ecosystems

Postdoctoral Researcher

Biography

Since August 2023, Manu joined JPL as a postdoc. Previously, he was a postdoc at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Manu has 7+ years of experience working on research projects funded by organisations such as UNESCO (Adaptation Fund), the European Space Agency, GCOS Switzerland, and the Swiss Federal Office of Environment.

Education

  • Ph.D. Geomatics Engineering (ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2021)
  • M.Sc. Electrical Engineering, Information Technology, and Computer Engineering (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, 2016)
  • B.Tech. Electronics and Communication Engineering (University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India, 2010)

Professional Experience

  • Post-doctoral researcher, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA (2023-present)
  • Post-doctoral researcher, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (2021-2023)
  • Post-doctoral researcher, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland (2021-2023)
  • Scientific Assistant, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (2016-2021)
  • Project Assistant, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India (2012-2013)

Community Service

  • Reviewer: Discovery grant, NSERC, Canada
  • Co-convener for EGU 2023 session on:
    • ”Remote sensing of cold regions”
    • "Advances in machine learning, data science and big data analytics for the cryosphere”
  • Peer reviewer for journals:
    • Remote Sensing of Environment
    • IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
    • Int. Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation
    • MDPI Remote Sensing
    • Multimedia Tools and Applications
    • AGU Journal of Geophysical Research - Oceans
    • Environmental Modeling and Software

Research Interests

  • Geospatial Computer Vision
  • Remote Sensing of the Environment (Lake Ice, Glacial Lakes, River Discharge)
  • Applied Deep Learning

Selected Awards

  • Best poster (runner-up) at the IGP colloquium, ETH Zurich (2017).
  • Rank 95 (0.001 percentile), Kerala State Engineering Entrance Examination (2006)

Selected Publications

Journal Publications

  1. Cerbelaud, A., David, C. H., Biancamaria, S., Wade, J., Tom, M., Frasson, R., Blumstein, D. (2024), Peak Flow Event Durations in the Mississippi River Basin and Implications for Temporal Sampling of Rivers, AGU Geophysical Research Letters, vol 51, issue 11, e2024GL109220, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109220
  2. la Cecilia, D., Tom, M., Stamm, C., Odermatt, D. (2023), Pixel-based mapping of open field and protected agriculture using constrained Sentinel-2 data, ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 8, 100033, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophoto.2023.100033
  3. Tom, M., Jiang, Y., Baltsavias, E., Schindler, K. (2022), Learning a Joint Embedding of Multiple Satellite Sensors: A Case Study for Lake Ice Monitoring, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 60, 1-15, 4306315, https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2022.3211184
  4. Tom, M., Wu, T., Baltsavias, E., Schindler, K. (2022), Recent Ice Trends in Swiss Mountain Lakes: 20-year Analysis of MODIS Imagery, PFG – Journal of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Science, 90, 413-431, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41064-022-00215-x
  5. Tom, M., Prabha, R., Wu, T., Baltsavias, E., Leal-Taixe, L., Schindler, K. (2020), Ice Monitoring in Swiss Lakes from Optical Satellites and Webcams using Machine Learning, Remote Sensing, 12, 21, 3555, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12213555
  6. Babu, R. V., Tom, M., Wadekar, P. (2016), A Survey on Compressed Domain Video Analysis Techniques, Multimedia Tools and Applications, 75, 2, 1043-1078, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2345-z
  7. Tom, M., Babu, R. V., Praveen, R. G. (2015), Compressed Domain Human Action Recognition in H.264/AVC Video Streams, Multimedia Tools and Applications, 74, 21, 9323-9338,
    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2083-2
  8. Babu, R. V., Rangarajan, B., Sundaram, S., Tom, M. (2015), Human Action Recognition in H.264/AVC Compressed Domain using Meta-cognitive Radial Basis Function Network, Applied Soft Computing, 36, 218-227,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2015.06.054

Pre-prints

  1. Cerbelaud, A., David, C. H., Biancamaria, S., Wade, J., Tom, M., Frasson, R., Allen, G. H., Thurman, H. R., Blumstein, D. (2024), Spatial Hydrographs of River Flow and their Analysis for Peak Event Detection in the Context of Satellite Sampling, Authorea, https://doi.org/10.22541/au.172228543.36697092/v1

Conference Publications (full-paper, peer-reviewed)

  1. Tom, M.*, Aguilar, R.*, Imhof, P., Leinss, S., Baltsavias, E., Schindler, K. (2020), Lake Ice Detection from Sentinel-1 SAR with Deep Learning, ISPRS Congress, Nice, France, September, ∗equal contribution, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-409-2020
  2. Prabha, R., Tom, M., Rothermel, M., Baltsavias, E., Leal-Taixe, L., Schindler, K. (2020), Lake Ice Monitoring with Webcams and Crowd-sourced Images, ISPRS Congress, Nice, France, September, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-2-2020-549-2020
  3. Tom, M., Kaelin, U., Suetterlin, M., Baltsavias, E., Schindler, K. (2018), Lake Ice Detection in Low-Resolution Optical Satellite Images, ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium, Riva del Garda, Italy, June, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-279-2018
  4. Xiao, M., Rothermel, M., Tom, M., Galliani, S., Baltsavias, E., Schindler, K. (2018), Lake Ice Monitoring with Webcams, ISPRS Technical Commission II Symposium, Riva del Garda, Italy, June, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-IV-2-311-2018
  5. Badami, I.*, Tom, M.*, Mathias, M., Leibe, B. (2017), 3D Semantic Segmentation of Modular Furniture using rjMCMC, IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, Santa Rosa, USA, March, ∗equal contribution, https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV.2017.15
  6. Tom, M., Babu, R. V. (2013), Fast Moving-Object Detection in H.264/AVC Compressed Domain for Video Surveillance, IEEE National Conference on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Graphics, Mumbai, India, December, https://doi.org/10.1109/NCVPRIPG.2013.6776202
  7. Tom, M., Babu, R. V. (2013), Rapid Human Action Recognition in H.264/AVC Compressed Domain for Video Surveillance, IEEE Visual Communications and Image Processing, Kuching, Malaysia, November, https://doi.org/10.1109/VCIP.2013.6706430

Projects

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