Masaki Yasukawa

Masaki Yasukawa is Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. He also serves as Senior Scientific Research Specialist at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). He received the B.Eng., M.Eng., and D.Eng. degrees from Tokyo University of Science in 1997, 1999, and 2004, respectively. His research interests include digital earth, satellite image processing, data visualization, virtual reality, and earth observation data mining. For nearly twenty years, he has been involved in the development and implementation of the Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) as a system, which has been used as an earth observations solution to help facilitate the development of regional water-related coordination mechanisms, flood early warning systems and e-learning programs for capacity building. Implementation has taken place along the Volta River Basin and the Niger River Basin in eleven countries of Western Africa: Benin, Burkina, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Togo as a UNESCO project called the Water Disaster Platform to enhance climate resilience in Africa (WaDiRe-Africa). Similar approaches have also been applied to the platforms on water resilience and disasters in Asian countries such as the Philippines and Myanmar under the framework of AOGEO. All of this work in Asia and West Africa is done under the GEO Work Programme activity, DIAS Initiative.