Members highlight
Andreea Nițu – Transilvania University of Brașov, Brașov (Romania)
Andreea Nițu received her B.S. in Information Technology from Transilvania University of Brașov and her M.S. in “Optimal Dynamic Systems and Economic-Financial Models” (SDOMEF) from the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica of Bucharest. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Electronic Engineering, Telecommunications and Information Technology.
She works as a research assistant within the AI4AGRI Center of Excellence. Her research focuses on satellite image processing for agricultural applications, with particular interest in vegetation indices, crop classification, and the comparative analysis of hyperspectral and multispectral imaging. As part of her scientific work, she has contributed to studies involving data from Sentinel-2 and PRISMA satellites for monitoring vegetation dynamics and crop separability.
She is the first author and co-author of several peer-reviewed publications, including “Quantitative Analysis of Vegetation Indices as Discriminators Between Different Crop Categories” presented at the 2024 International Symposium on Electronics and Telecommunications (ISETC). Her recent work includes unsupervised approaches to vegetation index analysis, segmentation of hyperspectral data for crop mapping, and semantic segmentation methods applied to agricultural imaging.
Matei Debu – Transilvania University of Brașov, Brașov (Romania)
Matei Debu received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Transilvania University of Brașov in 2023 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Modern Technologies in Software Systems Engineering at the same university.
He is actively involved as a research assistant in several projects, including notable initiatives such as AI4AGRI, which focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence in agriculture, and other projects like AI4RiSK, IMINT and SEEN all of them focus on using artificial intelligence in different scenarios.
His research interests span artificial intelligence, software systems design, and the application of modern technologies to solve complex, real-world problems.
News
AI4AGRI Monthly meeting
📅 Mon. 16 June – 14:00 (Fr/It time) | 15:00 (Ro time)
AI4AGRI Summer School 2025 is getting closer!
📍 ICDT, Brașov, Romania
AI4AGRI members are looking forward to welcoming AI4AGRI’s Summer school participants at R&D Institute of Transilvania University of Brașov in Brașov, Romania, from 14 to 19 July 2025.
During this event, participants will explore:
- Big Data, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning
- Advances in Remote Sensing for Agriculture
- Data Preprocessing, Visualization, and Denoising
- Real-world EO data applications in agriculture
To conclude the summer school, participants will gather for a brunch in the potato field at the National Institute of Research and Development for Potato and Sugar Beet.
See you in July in Brașov!
AI4AGRI Summer School venue at ICDT
SUMMER SCHOOL IFAC-CNR/Ce.Te.M.
📅 Mon. 19 – Fri. 23 May 2025
📍 Accademia delle Scienze e del Disegno, Florence, Italy
The summer school “Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Remote Sensing Methods for the Estimation of Geophysical Parameters of the Earth’s Surface” was held from May 19 to 23, 2025, at the Accademia delle Scienze e del Disegno in Florence. Organized by IFAC-CNR and Ce.Te.M. with support from IEEE and the Italian Association of Remote Sensing, the event brought together leading experts to explore the use of AI in Earth observation.
Fabio Del Frate, researcher at the University of Tor Vergata and member of the AI4AGRI project, participated as a speaker, contributing his expertise to the program.
AI4AGRI Upcoming Events
AI4AGRI Summer School 2025: EO Big Data for Agriculture
📅 Mon. 14 – Sat. 19 July 2025
📍 Brașov, Romania
The AI4AGRI summer school is planned to take place between 14-19 July 2025 in Brașov, Romania, being hosted by the Transilvania University of Brașov R&D Institute.
Participation to the AI4AGRI Summer School 2025 is for free and it will be face-to-face (in person). The organization and participation costs, including catering, are paid by the AI4AGRI project, however the AI4AGRI project will not cover for the travelling and other mission-related costs.
The applications are now closed as of 1st of May, if you have applied please wait for our feedback.
Latest AI4AGRI Publications
AI4AGRI members are working on new publications
Related Upcoming Events
UNIVERSEH PhD Workshop on AI and Space (online)
📅 Tue. 3 – Wed. 4 June 2025
📍 Online
The primary goal of this workshop is to train PhD students in new skills that are increasingly critical for their future professional integration and success in the evolving landscape of space research and innovation. In today’s interdisciplinary and fast-paced environment, researchers must not only excel in their respective domains but also develop complementary skills to adapt to complex challenges and work collaboratively across disciplines.
Day One will offer a general introduction to AI, followed by an introduction to the intersection of AI and Space, providing a comprehensive foundation for researchers from diverse backgrounds. Day Two will focus on Earth Observation and its applications across different research disciplines, exploring how AI technologies are advancing our understanding of the planet.
By combining lectures, presentations, networking sessions, and roundtables, the workshop aims to equip participants with knowledge, insights, and connections to advance their research and professional endeavors in this dynamic and impactful field.
Josiane Mothe, Mihai Ivanovici, Fabio Del Frate, and Antonio Di Noia from the AI4AGRI project will take part as presenters during this workshop.
More info: https://enquetes.univ-tlse2.fr/index.php/165897?lang=en
Copernicus WEkEO 4 Climate Change online workshop 2025
📅 Tue. 10 & Thu. 12 June 2025
📍 online
The Copernicus WEkEO Service is organizing a two-day online workshop to increase user awareness about climate change and its consequences.
The aim of this workshop is to share applications of the Copernicus WEkEO Service products in ecosystem monitoring studies and to focus on the main challenges faced by the Earth .
The workshop will cover a number of related topics, ranging from gases emissions, extreme weather and climate impacts in cities.
A practical session will be dedicated to live demonstrations of the use of the data using:
Register here: https://events.wekeo.eu/wekeo-4-climate-change
O3T Key Challenge annual seminar 2025
📅 Thursday 3 July 2025
📍 IRIT auditorium – Cr Rose Dieng-Kuntz, 31400 Toulouse
The annual seminar of the Défi Clé O3T will take place on Thursday, July 3, 2025, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the IRIT Auditorium in Toulouse. The event will feature opening remarks from representatives of the Occitanie Region, the DROCC-Est operational center, and the scientific lead of the Défi Clé O3T.
The program includes plenary sessions on Earth observation data access and O3T research outcomes, a flash presentation segment by PhD students and interns, a “World Café” on data sharing, a poster session during lunch, and a roundtable discussion.
The day will conclude with a presentation from the Mediterranean Institute for Environmental Transition (ITEM) and a closing reception.
Josiane Mothe from the AI4AGRI project will take part as presenter during this seminar.
Register by June 23: https://o3t.univ-toulouse.fr/seminaire-annuel/
📅 Mon. 25 – Fri. 29 August 2025
📍 Champs-sur-Marne, FRANCE
The LASTIG-ENSG summer school aims to train beginners in the methods, techniques and tools developed and/or used at the LASTIG laboratory.
The 2025 edition is a “light” prototype focusing on photogrammetry, photo acquisition and GNSS trajectory processing, and 3D rendering for a maximum of thirty people.
A secondary objective of the school is to manipulate open data using free software: open data, open source!
More info: https://enquetes.univ-tlse2.fr/index.php/165897?lang=en
📅 Thu. 11 – Fri. 12 September 2025
📍 Rennes, Brittany, FRANCE
“The AI4EO symposium has been initiated in 2022 in the context of the International AI Future Lab AI4EO. After 3 successful editions in Munich, this symposium is starting its international tour and the next edition will be hosted in Rennes, Brittany, France on September 11-12, 2025.
This symposium aims to gather the scientific community (PhD students, postdocs, junior and senior researchers) and the industry in the field of artificial intelligence for earth observation (AI4EO). It will offer two days full of highlights of research in the field, invited talks, poster and oral sessions, panel discussions… and of course social events.
This event will be organized by the OBELIX team of IRISA with the support of the ESA Phi-lab, the CNRS, the EMJM Copernicus Master in Digital Earth, the SequoIA Center of Excellence for Research and Training in AI, and the International AI Future Lab AI4EO.”
More info: https://ai4eo2025.irisa.fr/
Related Publications
GeoPix: A multimodal large language model for pixel-level image understanding in remote sensing
🧑 Ruizhe Ou et al.
📅 2025
“Multimodal (MM) large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in image- and region-level remote sensing (RS) image understanding tasks, such as image captioning (IC), visual question answering (VQA), and visual grounding. However, existing RS MLLMs lack pixel-level dialogue capability, which involves responding to user instructions with segmentation masks for specific instances. In this article, we propose GeoPix, an RS MLLM that extends image understanding capabilities to the pixel level. This is achieved by equipping the MLLM with a mask predictor, which transforms visual features from the vision encoder into masks conditioned on the LLM’s segmentation token embeddings. To facilitate the segmentation of multiscale objects in RS imagery, a class-wise learnable memory (CLM) module is integrated into the mask predictor to capture and store class-wise geo-context at the instance level across the entire dataset. In addition, to address the absence of large-scale datasets for training pixel-level RS MLLMs, we construct the GeoPixInstruct dataset, comprising 65,463 images and 140,412 instances, with each instance annotated with text descriptions, bounding boxes, and masks. Furthermore, we develop a two-stage training strategy to balance the distinct requirements of text generation and mask prediction in MM multitask optimization. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and superiority of GeoPix in pixel-level segmentation tasks while also maintaining competitive performance in image- and region-level benchmarks. The models, dataset, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Norman-Ou/GeoPix.”
Related projects in AI, Agriculture and Earth Observation
Call for Projects: Postdoctoral Contracts in Occitanie for O3T Project
📅 Deadline: July 21, 2025
A new call is open to fund postdoctoral research contracts in the Occitanie region, as part of the multidisciplinary project O3T – Earth Observation and Territories in Transition.
The projects must address at least one of the following three research axes:
- Low-cost instrumentation (e.g. field measurements, affordable sensors)
- Data retrieval and exploitation (storage, processing, analysis, visualization, sharing)
- Operationalization, awareness-raising, and co-construction of data and observatories with territories (collaborative frameworks between researchers and local actors)
Targeted environments include urban, rural, coastal, and mountain areas. Projects must respond to concrete operational needs tied to territorial transitions and demonstrate strong practical relevance.
Priority will be given to initiatives that include a 2–6 month immersion in an operational structure (e.g. local authority, NGO, national park, state agency, or social sciences lab active in fieldwork).
More info: https://o3t.univ-toulouse.fr/lancement-dun-nouvel-aap-pour-le-financement-de-contrats-postdoctoraux/
The AI4AGRI project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under the grant agreement no. 101079136.
Publishing managers: J. Mothe & S. Molina, UT3 & UT2, IRIT, France