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

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 (Exceptional Class 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.
For more information see www.2ik.fr

Prof. Nico Van de Weghe
Professor of GIScience & GeoAI
Ghent University, Belgium

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.