Johor Bahru, 15 Aug. 2016 – Prof Sr Dr Mazlan Hashim has been awarded recipient of Top Research Scientist Malaysia 2016, by Academy of Science Malaysia for his outstanding contribution in Advancing Remote Sensing Technology Applications. Focusing his research on scientific feature extraction for operational applications of remote sensing technology in natural resource management; environmental protection and management; as well as national strategic planning. To enable such diverse applications of remote sensing, Prof Mazlan has devised variety of dedicated satellite image processing techniques and analysis with computing skills to address various issues related on geomatic engineering, aerospace, environmental impact assessment, and signal processing. His main contributions on operational applications of remote sensing is evident by the total number of 188 indexed publications related to these works (authored/co-authored) in SCOPUS and web-of-science. These publications receive consistent citations globally. He has also been frequently invited as top-ranked journals reviewer in remote sensing as well as a plenary speaker.
Inline with the emerging global imaging technology enablers, Prof Mazlan has merged related diverse application needs in engineering sciences; applied sciences and technologies; environmental sciences, information and computer sciences where his feature extraction technique can either be applied to remotely sensed data from orbiting satellites, terrestrial platforms or for subsurface diagnostic mapping and analysis. Transforming these techniques to address operational gaps in humid tropical regions, notable contributions were in mapping of ecology services and goods and their impact due to landscape development, particularly in forest carbon storage; and coastal substrate mapping for sea-grass and other features for devising emerging need of acquiring information on blue-carbon. Both these contributions are very essential to be undertaken for regulating national and global policies on mitigating climate change effects. The ecologically sound landscape development will ensure vibrant biodiversity that ensure all pertinent food and water resources security. Only with the well-mapped coastal substrates enable sustainable management of coastal fishery environment for supporting related fishery and tourism industries. Thus, providing paramount resources sustainable not only to coastal fisherman livelihood but also as an important economical protein-source for the nation. In commercialising these applications, a university-spin-off company has been successfully formed using the patents created for the feature extraction techniques.
His contribution has received various international recognition (such as Eduord Dolezal Award 1996; Eco-frontier fellowship award 2003-2005, ScienceDirect top-25-downloads 2013, 2014, 2015) and held several positions as Visiting Professor/Scientist at Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan (2011-2016); Univ. of Cambridge, United Kingdom (2010); National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan (2002, 2003, 2004), Peking University, China (1990), and Tohoku Univ, Japan (1989). He has also established collaboration networks for these applications in the research for Asia Pacific Network, Marie-Curie Project of European Union, Japanese Society for Promotional of Science, Chinese Academy of Science on Remote Sensing & Digital Earth, Arab Academy of Science, Marine, Technology & Transport among collaborations through which has continuously enhanced his knowledge, helped finding knowledge gaps, essential for nurturing new research ideas to prospective research students.