Key Takeaways – EMVA Business Conference 2024

Close to 100 attendees, most of them C-level representatives of vision tech companies met from 13th – 15th June in Gdansk/Poland at the EMVA Business Conference 2024.
During the conference breaks 130 bilateral B2B-meetings were held amongst the conference delegates, making the conference once again an exceptional place to network.

The opening Keynote speaker Sudha David-Wilp put the upcoming U.S. election in context with the question of geopolitical stability. But before doing that she pointed out 2024 marks the biggest election year in history with half of the globe at the polls. David-Wilp sees democracies increasingly challenged internally e.g. by emerging right wing parties, climate change and other topics why at the same time they want to keep the existing world order intact. In her opinion the USA is going to turn its interests more and more into the Indo-Pacific; and regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election Europe should try to speak with one voice, invest in defense, boost competitiveness and de-risk from China in order to play a role in the future world order.

A rising geopolitics player is India which was introduced by another speaker as a ‘“country of countries’ where foreign investors need to look at the peculiarities in the different states of India. Localization is the key to adapt products to suit local requirements. India currently also profits from an ‘ABC: Anything But China’ sentiment positioning itself as an alternative to China. Bottom line, it was said that the Indian economy looks like an attractive investment destination, but it is one of the most difficult markets to enter, with constant sales growth being a steady challenge. As to vision tech, only recently the Indian Machine Vision Association was founded.

In good tradition of the EMVA Business Conference also the machine vision market in the hosting country Poland was presented. Highly specialized staff; good economic growth with further investments in automation as well as an extensive scientific ecosystem with national and EU-wide programs financing R&D and automation activities support the further adoption of machine vision in Poland. This is hampered, however by still relatively low labor costs and low effectiveness of foreign expansion of Polish entities.

This conference edition also provided room for the two young machine vision companies Medabsy and VisionX to talk about the backgrounds, challenges and motivation on how their enterprises were founded.
In the technical part of the conference program a Fraunhofer IOSB presentation delivered insights in the various applications of adaptive optics, ranging from deep-space optical communications for future deep-space missions over ophthalmic applications, directed energy to astronomy with wavefront sensing and correction. Another speaker presented a vision-based solution to more precisely define the inventory of any bulk material. This was followed by a literally eye-opening speech about the potential threats for the industrial sectors that may arise from synthetic, deliberately modified data which will be ever-present and indistinguishable from authentic data and was called the ‘distrust epidemic’. Another speaker set the focus on democratizing robotics with a robotics & AI software platform to unlock the potential of robotics for millions more developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses; by following the principles of state-of-the-art performance, scalability and low cost as well as ease of use. Furthermore, an interesting contribution highlighting hyperspectral imaging presented the first hyperspectral inspection system in the food industry based on the photon counting technique capable of performing real-time chemical and physical analysis of a product to detect anomalies and foreign parts.

The presentation titled ‘Navigating embedded vision system complexities in the era of AI’ sees AI as the fuel for new vision applications which also creates new types of vision tech customers that focus on fast developments and short time-to-market. These systems often have lot of investment in the background, are usually scaled on higher volumes and differentiate with software rather than hardware. Bottom-line, these new type of customers tend to underestimate the complexity of new imaging front-end product development while the geopolitical environment supports a trend to pull the supply chain back in the western world.

The talk on machine vision as a key technology in battery production by EMVA Board Member and Basler’s General Manager GTM EMEA Arndt Bake gave a promising outlook on the potential of vision tech in this industry. It was expected that the market size of the global battery market will equal the size of the Semiconductor Market already in 2030 while currently battery factories in Europe are being built and ramping up to cover domestic European demand. Herein, the manufacturing processes and yield output have still room for optimization through use of machine vision.

How to survive risks and recognize opportunities in an uncertain world and survive the next decade of machine vision was discussed in a panel moderated by Europe Sciences´ CEO Warren Clark; with panelist from different machine vision technology approaches and company sizes giving their view.

The dedicated closing keynote of the 22th EMVA Business Conference given by Prof. Dominik Bösl vividly proved that automation has no alternative due to the long term development of the world population. With that, the future of (mobile) robotics is now and AI is going to be key. Our generation of grandchildren will grow up in daily contact with robots, making them the first generation of robotic natives.

The 23rd EMVA Business Conference is scheduled to take place 22th – 24th May, 2025 in Rome/Italy.

The 21st EMVA Business Conference 2023 sets new bench marks.

From 4-6 May 2023 the vision community met in Seville, Spain, for the annual EMVA highlight event and at this occasion celebrating EMVA’s 20th anniversary. Around 110 registered conference attendees enjoyed an highly interesting conference program and used the excellent networking opportunities to exchange ideas and discuss new business cases.

With 139 pre-scheduled face-to-face meetings – a new record! – the conference breaks were extensively used to meet & greet new players in the industry as well as catching up with long-lasting business partners.

A big step towards more diversity could be achieved by having five female vision experts on stage. Dr. Anna Lukasson-Herzig – CEO of nyris GmbH -, Anna Petrovicheva – CTO at OpenCV.ai – and Dr. Petra Gospodnetic – Group Leader at Fraunhofer ITWM – contributed with inspiring talks. Nuria Garrido López – Continental Automotive – and Petra Thanner – AIT – shared their expertise during the panel discussion.

The very well received opening keynote given by Prof. Dr. Niklas Potrafke from the German ifo Institute already set the course into an excellent conference program.
Titled ‘Did the World Change? European Business in a New Geopolitical Era‘ he addressed mega trends, shocks and expectations touching topics from globalization and digitalization towards climate change and populism.

‘Finding Talent in a Tough Employment Market‘, keynote by Nigel Jeremy, globally recognised HR expert, closed the conference setup on Saturday. Several questions and comments out of the audience proved the growing importance the topic meanwhile has for companies of all sizes.

Presentation of awarded work again an outstanding contribution to the program

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2023 goes to Dr. Pieter Blok for his work ‘Advanced deep learning for harvest robotics’. Pieter Blok is a researcher Deep Learning and Computer Vision at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. Pieter holds a Bachelor and Master of Sciences in Agricultural Engineering from Wageningen University. In December 2022, he obtained his PhD degree at Wageningen University with the thesis entitled ‘Perception models for selective harvesting robots in fruit and vegetable production‘. This PhD thesis was awarded the distinction cum laude. From July 1st, 2023, Pieter will continue his scientific career as an assistant professor at the Laboratory of Field Phenomics at the University of Tokyo in Japan. In Tokyo, Pieter will focus on machine learning and image processing technologies for plant phenotyping.

20 years EMVA

Celebrating 20 years of EMVA was not only motivation for a beautiful anniversary cake during the Friday conference dinner but also gave direction for two conference slots.

First Arndt Bake – Basler AG – took a look back with the talk ‘Reflections on the Last Two Decades of Machine Vision: The Evolution of a Strategic Sector‘.

Afterwards the panelists were trying to answer the question: ‘Machine Vision 2040 – Will all the challenges be solved?‘ Despite of nobody yet having found the crystal ball to know the future, based on their outstanding expertise, all were encouraged to share their ‘educated guess’.

Last but not least the impressive historical center of Seville offered the spectacular surrounding for the evening socialising and networking events on Thursday and Friday and the optional Saturday afternoon networking tour.
Impressions may be found at the Picture Gallery.

The 17th EMVA Business Conference 2019 from 16th to 18th May, which this time took place in Copenhagen, was again attended by more than 100 representatives of the entire international vision industry.

The conference program once again impressed with top-class speakers and contributions on highly relevant topics of technology and industry. The guests from all over the world enjoyed an extensive offer for interactive networking and interesting programs.

Dr. Bernd Liepert, President of euRobotics aisbl, held the opening keynote titled “Robotics needs Vision – Vision needs Robotics” and gave insights to the world of robotics and especially to the ongoing projects to uptake robotics in Europe supported by the European Commission.

Another highlight of the conference was the panel discussion on the topic “How will Embedded Vision impact our future?” moderated by Peter Ebert (Editor in Chief at inVision). The many widely varied opinions and views reflected a very representative picture of this trend technology for the vision industry.

Meik Wiking, CEO of The Happiness Research Institute, closed the last day of the conference with an inspiring insight into the secrets of happiness as a keynote speaker.

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2019 goes to Dr. Johannes Meyer, for his work “Light Field Methods for the Visual Inspection of Transparent Objects”. The EMVA Young Professional Award is an annual award to honor the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing. It is the goal of the European Machine Vision Association EMVA to further support innovation in the machine vision industry, to contribute to the important aspect of dedicated machine vision education and to provide a bridge between research and industry. The awardee was announced on May 18 during the 17^th EMVA Business Conference in Copenhagen/Denmark, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program.

The traditional Friday Evening Dinner Event and the Saturday Networking Tour contributed significantly to promoting networking, which was highly valued by all participants.

The 2018 edition of the annual EMVA conference – this time in Dubrovnik, Croatia – marked new records. First more than 120 attendees registered and with 123 pre-scheduled face-to-face meetings the networking was lifted to a new level.
Business leaders and technical experts within the machine vision industry from Europe and around the world enjoyed a well-balanced mixture of high-level speeches and networking opportunities.

The conference covered the different business segments Management, Technology, Innovation, Markets and Marketing and again it offered outstanding networking opportunities.

Young Professional Award

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2018 goes to Ms. Doris Antensteiner, for her work “Light Field and Photometric Stereo”. Antensteiner, age 32, obtained a master degree in Computer Science in 2011 and a master degree in Computer Science Management in 2014, both from Vienna University of Technology. Between 2012 and 2015 she worked as “Image Processing Engineer“ in „R&D Video and Sensors“ at Kapsch TrafficCom. Currently, she works at the Austrian Institute of Technology Center for Vision, Automation and Control and is a PhD Candidate at Graz University of Technology.

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Prague, the ‘Golden City’, received 110+ attendees and guests for the 2017 edition of the EMVA conference.
Business leaders and technical experts within the machine vision industry from Europe and around the world enjoyed a well-balanced mixture of high-level speeches and networking opportunities.

The conference covered the different business segments Management, Technology, Innovation, Markets and Marketing and again it offered outstanding networking opportunities.

Young Professional Award

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2017 goes to Mr. Boaz Arad, for his work “Sparse Recovery of Hyperspectral Signal from Natural RGB Images”.

Arad, age 32, obtained his Computer Science B.Sc. (cum laude) from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in 2012. Continuing towards a fast-tracked Ph.D. at the BGU Interdisciplinary Computational Vision Laboratory (ICVL), he received an M.Sc. in 2014 and expects to complete his Ph.D. by 2018. In addition to his studies, Boaz currently serves as CTO of the startup company “HC-Vision”.

The awardee was announced on June 24 during the 15^th EMVA Business Conference in Prague/Czech Republic, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program.

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Every year the EMVA brings together business leaders and technical experts within the machine vision industry from Europe and around the world with a well-balanced mixture of high-level speeches and networking opportunities.

In 2016 the EMVA Team invited the machine vision community for the 14th edition of EMVA’s annual conference to Edinburgh, Scotland, 9-11 June 2016. The conference covered the different business segments Management, Technology, Innovation, Markets and Marketing and again it offered outstanding networking opportunities.

Young Professional Award

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2016 goes to Mr. Tolga Birdal, for his work “Reconstruction via Detection: Efficient and Automatic Reconstruction from Unorganized 3D Scans”. Birdal, age 33, holds a Master degree in Computational Science and Engineering and is currently PhD candidate at the Computer Vision Group at the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich and Research Scientist at Siemens AG.

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The Radisson Blu Hotel Edinburgh with its 16th-century style facade and located in the heart of the capital on the Royal Mile hosted the nearly 120 conference attendees who besides of the professional conference content especially enjoyed the short distance to the spectacular tourist spots in Edinburgh. Get some impressions of our side program social events and visit the foto gallery.

In 2015 the EMVA Team invited the machine vision community for the 13th edition of EMVA’s annual conference to Athens, Greece 11-13 June 2015.

The conference covered the different business segments Management, Technology, Innovation, Markets and Marketing and again it offered outstanding networking opportunities.

Young Professional Award:

The EMVA Young Professional Award 2015 goes to Benjamin Busam, for his work on adaptable high-resolution real-time stereo tracking. Busam, who is 27 years old holds a Master degree in mathematics and is currently external PhD Student in informatics with focus on Computer Vision at the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures of the Technical University of Munich, in cooperation with FRAMOS GmbH where he works as development engineer in the imaging systems department.

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Divani Caravel Hotel, one of Athen’s leading business hotels hosted the 110+ conference attendees who especially enjoyed the spectacular views on Athens. Get some impressions of our side program social events and visit the foto gallery.