OGC appoints Kumar Navulur and Frank Suykens to Board of Directors

18 December 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the appointment of Kumar Navulur (left) and Frank Suykens (right) to its Board of Directors.

OGC Chair, Jeff Harris, commented that “Dr. Navulur and Dr. Suykens collectively bring important market insight and leadership to OGC’s Board of Directors that will assist in informing the consortium’s strategic direction as it addresses rapidly changing - and increasingly complex - markets and technologies. Both Dr. Navulur and Dr. Suykens are longtime supporters of OGC and open standards as enablers of efficiency and effectiveness in the global marketplace. Their expertise will add important perspectives to the Board.”

Dr. Kumar Navulur is the Senior Director of Global Strategic Programs at DigitalGlobe, and holds a doctoral degree from Purdue University. He has held various executive positions in the geospatial industry where he was the president of Pixxures, an aerial imagery company. He also held the CTO position at Spectrum Mapping, a Lidar and imaging company. Currently he serves at the president of DigitalGlobe Foundation, a non-profit company that is focused on developing geospatial capacity around the globe.

Kumar is the author of the book Multispectral Image Analysis Using the Object-Oriented Paradigm. He served as the adjunct professor at University of Denver as well as University of Colorado, where he advises doctoral students on their dissertations. He is an invited speaker at various international conferences and an avid supporter of standards for the geospatial industry.

Frank Suykens has been leading Luciad R&D since 2005, and continues to do so after its acquisition by Hexagon, as CTO - Platforms in the Geospatial Division. He led the R&D team from merely implementing the WMS standard in Luciad’s situational awareness platform to a team with a ‘standards first’ approach, actively participating in OGC.

Frank holds a Ph.D in Computer Graphics, researching photo-realistic image synthesis, and a M.Sc. in Software Engineering from the University of Leuven, Belgium. He started his career at Barco in 1995 as a software engineer in the prepress industry. With this hardcore software background, he is very passionate about efficient and effective standards for the geospatial industry.