Günter Hein

Günter Hein is a member of the European Commission’s Galileo Signal Task Force and the organizer of the annual Munich Satellite Summit. He has been a full professor and director of the Institute of Geodesy and Navigation at Germany’s University FAF Munich since 1983.

He is a contributing editor to Inside GNSS and coordinates the column, “Working Papers.”

In 2002, Prof. Hein received the United States Institute of Navigation Johannes Kepler Award for sustained and significant contributions to the development of satellite navigation.

During the 1980s, he formed a research group that did pioneering work in the field of real-time kinematic GPS positioning and GPS-INS integration.

Prof. Hein has served as a visiting professor and scientist at a number of universities and organizations internationally. He has contributed to more than 185 articles, papers, and presentations on geodesy and navigation and has been awarded more than 100 research grants.

He received his Dipl. –Ing. and Dr. –Ing. degrees in geodesy from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.

» Günter Hein’s website

Mark Petovello

Mark Petovello is an assistant professor in the Department of Geomatics Engineering at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

He and colleague Gérard Lachapelle are contributing editors to Inside GNSS and coordinate the column, “GNSS Solutions.”

He has been actively involved in many aspects of positioning and navigation since 1997, including GNSS algorithm development, inertial navigation, sensor integration, and software development.

From 2003 to 2005, Dr. Petovello led the University of Calgary’s Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS) research that included a seminal assessment of the amount of flexure experienced upon an aircraft carrier at sea using GPS and inertial sensors, and he led the development of a novel algorithm for assessing the probability of correct ambiguity resolution for geometry- based positioning strategies.

He supervised the execution of a research contract with a major automobile manufacturer in which low-cost, onboard sensors are used for centimeter-level positioning. Part of this work resulted in a patent filing in 2006.

Since 2005, Dr. Petovello led the group’s software-based receiver development effort with a focus on carrier phase tracking under degraded signal environments. As part of this, Dr. Petovello developed a new algorithm to improve the processing efficiency of software-based receivers by 25 percent. He filed a patent on this algorithm in 2006.

In 2006, he received the U.S. Institute of Navigation Early Achievement Award, given to individuals who have made outstanding achievements early in their career in the art and science of navigation.

» Mark Petovello’s website