David Rapado Rincon, Wageningen University & Research

David Rapado Rinco is a PhD candidate in artificial intelligence for agri-food robotics at Wageningen University. He is passionate about deep learning and artificial intelligence in general. He has been doing research in deep learning since 2018. He has experience working with 2D and 3D deep learning, and their applications in agricultural robots, plant phenotyping and in the food processing industry. In his PhD, he explore the use of deep learning over time series to build representations of agri-food environments for robotic applications.  He is also involved in teaching of courses about deep learning and computer vision.

Gert Kootstra, Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands

Dr. Gert Kootstra is Associate professor at Wageningen University, working on computer vision and robotics with applications in the domain of agriculture with the aim to facilitate the transition to more sustainable agriculture and food production. He is currently supervising a team of 20 PhD students and postdocs developing (active) computer-vision methods with a diverse set of applications in plant and animal production systems, aiming to get information out of image that can be used to inform farmers, breeders, scientists, or robotic systems.

Gert finished his PhD in Artificial Intelligence in 2009 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In 2012, he started working at Wageningen University and Research first as applied researchers and from 2017 as academic researcher in the Agricultural Biosystems Engineering group, where he is still working.

Manuel Córdova Neira, Wageningen University & Research

Manuel Córdova Neira is working as researcher at the Wageningen University & Research. He received his B.Sc (Systems Engineer) degree from National University of Loja (UNL), Ecuador in 2010, and his M.Sc. (Computer Science) and Ph.D. from the University of Campinas, in 2015 and 2022, respectively. He worked as Professor at Department of Systems Engineering, National University of Loja (UNL), Ecuador, in 2016-2018. He is member of the RECOD lab, where he has been working in research projects involving machine learning and computer vision.  Part of the Agricultural Biosystems Engineering where he has been researching on computer vision tasks for fish detection and weight estimation. During the last years Manuel Córdova Neira has been participating in projects related to computer vision, such as Multi-Lingual Text Spotting and Recognition (Unicamp and Samsung R&D Institute Brazil), PlastOpool (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Fully Documented Fisheries (Wageningen University), Every Fish (Wageningen University).

Vítor Verdelho, Visiting Professor at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, General Manager of the European Algae Biomass Association

Born in Porto, Portugal, on March 9th, 1966, I hold a degree in Physics from the Sciences Faculty of Porto University. With over 25 years of experience in biotechnology projects, I am a Co-Founder and shareholder of Necton, SA, a marine biotechnology company established in 1997. Our ventures encompass the commercial production of traditional sea salt and microalgae. In 2008, I embarked on another entrepreneurial journey as a Co-Founder and shareholder of A4F – Algae for Future SA. Currently, I serve as the CEO and co-founder of Cell4Food, a pioneering company in the 'cultivated meat' segment of cellular agriculture since 2022.

Throughout my career, I have actively participated in over 20 European and 40 National research projects across various frameworks and programs, collaborating with more than 100 partner organizations throughout Europe. I have held the role of General Manager of the European Algae Biomass Association since 2015, representing the Algae Biomass sector. Over the past three decades, I have honed a diverse set of teaching and management skills in various domains, directly mentoring over 200 start-ups across different frameworks. Furthermore, I am privileged to serve as a Visiting Professor at the Católica Porto Business School and have contributed as a co-author to the trilogy of books titled "The Business Case Roadmap".