Keynote presentations

Prof. Dr. Sara Beery is an Assistant Professor at MIT EECS’ Faculty of AI and Decision Making and CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Previously a visiting researcher at Google working on Auto Arborist, she combines a deep love of the natural world with cutting-edge technology to tackle conservation and sustainability challenges. Her research develops computer vision methods for global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring, addressing complex real-world issues like domain shifts, imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions.

Prof. Beery will deliver a keynote lecture on « AI & Biodiversity« .

In a world overflowing with digital data—often unstructured and underused—Prof. Dr. Devis Tuia explores how machine learning can turn satellite, drone, and ground-based sensor data into actionable environmental insights. From mapping ecosystems to monitoring human impacts, his research bridges AI and geoscience to address the climate and biodiversity crises. Prof. Tuia will deliver a keynote lecture on “Machine Learning for Earth: Monitoring the Pulse of Our Planet with Sensor Data, from Your Phone All the Way to Space”

Prof. Tuia completed his PhD at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he studied kernel methods for hyperspectral satellite data. He then traveled the world as a postdoc, first at University of València, then at CU Boulder and finally back to EPFL. In 2014, he became assistant professor at University of Zurich, and in 2017 he moved to Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where he was chair of the Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since September 2020, he is back at EPFL, where he leads the Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation laboratory (ECEO) in Sion. There, he studies the Earth from above with machine learning and computer vision.

Dr. Mikolaj Czerkawski is a researcher specialising in AI, computer vision, signal processing and Earth observation. Before joining Asterisk Labs he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Space Agency. His research interests include data-centric analyses of large-scale Earth observation data, dataset curation, generative modelling, and restoration tasks for satellite imagery. He is a co-founder of the Major TOM community project, a platform for collaborating and reusing Earth observation datasets designed specifically for AI pipelines. He received the B.Eng. degree in electronic and electrical engineering in 2019 from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, United Kingdom, and the Ph.D. degree in 2023 at the same institution, specialising in applications of computer vision to Earth observation data.