Bio
Francesco Marinello is an Associate Professor at the Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry of the University of Padova (Italy). After his PhD in precision engineering and metrology, he was jointly supervised by the Technical University of Denmark (Lingby, Denmark), and he spent two years at the InterUniversity Center for Nanotechnologies (Venice, Italy) and two years at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (Lugano, Switzerland). Since 2012, he has been a researcher at the University of Padova, and since 2017, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Georgia (Athens, USA): he is responsible for the courses in “Agricultural Mechanics”, “Precision Farming”, “Applied Statistics”, “Sustainable resource-efficient food production and processing” and “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Agriculture”. Marinello was recently appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal Agriculture (Digital Technologies section).

Bio
Dimitrios Stergios Paraforos was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and grew up on a farm in Northern Greece. He completed his BSc studies in Automation Engineering at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (former Technological Educational Institute of Chalkida) and his MSc in Agricultural Engineering at the University of Thessaly. After working for some years in the Industry as an Automation Engineer, he joined the University of Hohenheim where he obtained his PhD (2016) and Habilitation (2020) in Agricultural Engineering. In 2018 he received the Baden-Württemberg Certificate for academic teaching, while in 2020 he was awarded the GIL prize for his Habilitation Thesis. Since October 2021 he is serving as a Deputy Professor of Agricultural Engineering in Special Crops at the Hochschule Geisenheim University. He is also serving as an associate editor of Computers and Electronics in Agriculture and is a member of the Editorial Board of Smart Agricultural Technology (both published by Elsevier). He has participated in more than 20 European and National research projects. In the past, he has co-ordinated the ICT-AGRI project iFAROS while currently, he is a WP-Leader in the H2020 project ROBS4CROPS. He is the author or co-author of more than 50 papers indexed by Scopus and published in journals or presented at national and international conferences. His research interests include agricultural machinery automation, ISOBUS technologies, unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, and decentralized and resilient digital farming systems.

Bio
Currently Head of the Department of Biosystems Engineering at Poznań University of Life Sciences, where he specializes in the use of artificial intelligence methods in agriculture. Associated with computer science almost since childhood. He can program in the C# language. He is interested in software engineering. Applies artificial intelligence algorithms and computer image processing and analysis to agricultural engineering problems and beyond. He is fluent with artificial neural network simulators in Statistica and H2O package. Because of his background in artificial intelligence, his area of interest also includes data processing and analysis. His professional life is related to empirical science and the application of computer science methods at the intersection of different, seemingly incompatible fields. In March 2013, He defended my doctoral dissertation titled: Identification of selected quality characteristics of greenhouse tomatoes using neural image analysis, and in November 2018, He received my postdoctoral degree - the title of my dissertation: The Quality Identification of Selected Products from the Agro-Food Sector and Agricultural Waste Processing Using Deep Neural Models. He is the part of a research and teaching staff and also Chair of the Scientific Council of the Scientific Discipline of Mechanical Engineering.