Keynote Speakers
Prof. Jean Sequeira
CEO of the 2IK Company (2IK: Image, Information & Knowledge)
Full Professor at the Computer Science
Department of the Aix-Marseille University,
France
Bio: Prof. Jean Sequeira has been the
CEO of 2IK (Image, Information & Knowledge)
company since 2017 and an “Invited
Professor” since 2008 at the IRSA (Institute
for Remote Sensing Applications – institute
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences).
Formerly, he had been a research project
leader at the IBM France company (1981-1991)
and a Full Professor at the Aix-Marseille
Université from 1991 to 2021 (Distinguished
Professor since 2010). He used to work in
foreign countries (two years in Ivory Coast
and six months in United States) or in
collaboration with various countries as
China, Algeria, Peru, India, Burkina Faso,
Canada. He also developed research
partnerships with several industrial
companies. In 2006, he participated to the
creation of an international organization,
ISDE (International Society for Digital
Earth) and he had been a member of its
Executive Committee for ten years
(2006-2016). He is the author of about 135
papers and he supervised about 30 PhD
students.
During the last 45 years, Prof. Jean
Sequeira has been developing research and
projects (with institutes and industrials)
in the field of “Image and Computer
Science”, i.e. “Image Analysis”,
“Geometrical Modeling”, “Visualization and
Immersive Interaction”, ”Pattern
Recognition”, “Artificial Intelligence”, for
applications dedicated to “Medical Imaging”,
“Remote Sensing”, “Forensics”, “Industrial
Computer Vision”, “Video Watching” and
“Sport Supervision”. Since he retired from
his position of Professor at the University
in 2021, Jean Sequeira has been developing a
Research and Development activity on behalf
of the 2IK company, through several
partnerships with industrials and academics.
Since December 2023, he is also a Member of
the “Academie des Sciences, Lettres et Arts
de Marseille”.
For more information see www.2ik.fr
Prof. Nico Van de Weghe
Professor of GIScience & GeoAI
Ghent University, Belgium
Bio: Prof. dr. Nico Van de Weghe is a full professor of GIScience, a scientific discipline at the intersection of computer science, social science, and natural science. GIScience involves the study of geospatial information and how people understand the world. It also addresses how phenomena of the world can be stored, represented, and analyzed. It lies at the basis of GeoAI, which is the goal of enabling machines to learn to reason and analyse spatially like a human. Since his PhD research in 2004, Van de Weghe has had a broad interest in knowledge-based AI, specifically spatiotemporal reasoning and analysis. As in all areas related to AI, data-driven approaches are becoming increasingly dominant in GeoAI. Therefore, Van de Weghe is currently focusing on research in both knowledge-based and data-driven GeoAI. He is exploring the possibilities of combining both into hybrid GeoAI, which might be a next important step in generative AI.