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.
