NON-GOVERNMENT/NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
NO/NR
Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Center, NR) is a private, independent, non-profit foundation established in 1952. NR carries out contract research and development projects in the areas of information and communication technology and applied statistical modeling, including earth observation. NR is one of the technical and industrial research institutes in Norway. Research institutes carry out approximately 25% of the research in Norway. NR receives a small basic funding from the government through the Research Council of Norway but depends mainly on funding for all the research projects from the organization that benefits from the research. Until 1970 an important part of the activity was to perform mathematical computations for other organizations. After 1970 NR has been a methodological research institute. In 1985, NR became an independent institute and moved to its present location in 1988. NR is famous for inventing the first object-oriented programming language Simula in the 1960s. NR has worked with data communication since 1963, the Internet since 1973 and multimedia since 1994. NR started working with statistics in 1952, remote sensing in 1982, geostatistics and petroleum in 1983, marine resources in 1988 and electricity prices and finance in 1994. NR has been a leading research and development institute in satellite remote sensing since Norway started to focus on this discipline in the beginning of the 1980's. The institute's main role has since then been to do research and development of methodologies for analysis of digital remote sensing data, in particular methodologies for semi-automatic and automatic classification, parameter retrieval and object recognition. Building on national and international collaboration, NR has been able to make significant contributions in several application areas, like environmental monitoring, climate change monitoring, environmental emergency detection, natural resource mapping and map revision. Our vision is to perform research and development leading to new remote sensing methodologies for improved ways of environmental monitoring, natural resource mapping and other applications for public authorities and industry. http://earthobs.nr.no