Well over 100 participants attended the 2013 EMVA Business Conference held on 6-8 June in Barcelona, Spain. The gathering also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), which was founded one decade ago in Barcelona. As in the previous years, the mixture of high-level speeches and networking opportunities in an attractive conference location was valued by the participants. In particular, the high number of previously booked business-to-business (B2B) meetings during the conference breaks showed that the EMVA conference is an important meeting place for the international machine vision community in Europe.
The conference program was marked by speakers covering general economic topics such as keynote speaker Stefan Schneider, head of the macroeconomics team at Deutsche Bank Research, who analysed the current macroeconomic situation in Europe. Dr. Sabine Stricker-Kellerer from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP explained the legal framework for business development, focusing on joint ventures and acquisitions in China. In her talk she focused specifically on IP protection from the viewpoint of small and medium-sized companies. The keynote speech on the last conference day was given by Prof. Dominique Foray from EPFL in Switzerland, who fascinated the audience with his analysis about entrepreneurial discovery and smart specialisation in the knowledge industry.
Prof. Dominique Foray giving keynote on final day
Machine vision topics were addressed by Rogier Scheffer from Belgian SoftKinetic who talked about machine vision in consumer products; Dr. Alessandro Tesini presented the international large-scale nuclear fusion research project ITER, which is supposed to become a new reference term for big science projects and, due to extremely high temperatures and radiation levels, will to a large extent rely on machine vision supported remote handling and inspection. Paul Danini from Yole Dévelopment gave an outlook on the development of the image sensor sector until 2020.
During the EMVA General Assembly, which was held on Thursday afternoon prior to the conference, EMVA president Toni Ventura-Traveset reviewed EMVA’s growth path during the last 10 years while its general manager Thomas Lübkemeier announced that the EMVA will present the International Machine Vision Standards Exhibition at SPS IPC Drives 2013, taking place on 26-28 November in Nuremberg, Germany. Furthermore, the General Assembly elected Jochem Herrmann as sixth member of EMVA’s Board of Directors. Jochem Herrmann will drive forward EMVA’s activities regarding standardisation and during the conference gave a presentation on the work of the international Future Standards Forum (FSF).
The EMVA Business Conference 2013 closed with an outlook to the 2014 conference, which will be held in Vienna, Austria.
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