About Us

The surface of the Earth is being mapped in high resolution using sensors and satellites. This has the potential to transform everything from how we plan our cities to how we protect the environment and chart the oceans. We are creating the digital tools to realize this potential.

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Our mission

A revolution in sensor and mapping technology is providing an unprecedented opportunity to create high-resolution 3-dimensional maps of the surface of the Earth. These maps are already being created for entire countries. We believe in a future where these maps are not only available for most countries, but also regularly updated to reflect surface changing activities and processes such as urban development and natural erosion. With large-scale access to updated and high-resolution maps, it is possible to instantly deliver accurate data and analysis for any area of interest. This has the potential to fundamentally transform how engineers, urban planners, architects and government administrators work with geographical information.

Our mission is to realize this potential by developing innovative digital tools and custom analysis based on cutting edge algorithm technology. In order to achieve our mission, we intensively research new algorithm and data-processing technology and constantly work to collect, organize and analyze 3-dimensional maps for those countries where they are already available.

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Our background

SCALGO was founded to bring cutting-edge massive terrain data-processing technology to the market. Our technology builds on more than two decades of basic and applied research within I/O-efficient and geometric algorithms at the Center for Massive Data Algorithms (MADALGO) at Aarhus University, Denmark, and at Duke University, U.S. The founders of SCALGO are world-leading researchers at these institutions. SCALGO maintains close ties to a number of research partners and domain experts in order to continue research into cutting-edge algorithm technology and new innovative digital tools.

SCALGO began working with the national elevation model of Denmark but has since expanded coverage to all Scandinavian countries handling more than 700 billion elevation measurements.

Our Founders

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Morten Revsbæk

Chief Executive Officer, Co-founder

Morten Revsbæk earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Aarhus University in 2014. Morten has worked both as a consultant on commercial software development projects and on international research projects within algorithm theory, pervasive computing and artificial intelligence. Since 2006 Morten has been involved in the development of algorithms for handling massive terrain data both in theory and in practice.

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Thomas Mølhave

Chief Technology Officer, Co-founder

Thomas Mølhave earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Aarhus University in 2009, following that he worked for a number of years at beautiful Duke University.

Thomas has been the principal developer of several massive data projects (such as TerraSTREAM and TPIE).

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Lars Arge

Chairman of the Board, Co-founder

Lars Arge was a Professor of Computer Science at Aarhus University and Director of Center for Massive Data Algorithmics (MADALGO). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Aarhus University in 1996, and was a Professor at Duke University until August 2004.

Lars was an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, as well as of the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He was an ACM Fellow, the recipient of the Danish Minister of Research Elite Research Award and a Career Award from the US National Science Foundation.

Sadly, Lars passed away in December 2020.

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Pankaj K. Agarwal

Co-founder

Pankaj K. Agarwal is the RJR Nabisco Professor of Computer Science at Duke University.

He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1989 and his masters degree in Computer Science from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1986. Pankaj served as chair of the Department of Computer Science at Duke from 2004 to 2010. He also has an appointment in the Department of Mathematics.

Pankaj is an ACM Fellow, A Sloan Fellow, and a National Young Investigator.