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Francesco Nex

Prof. Dr. Ing.

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5712-6902
Calculated based on number of publications stored in Pure and citations from Scopus
20072024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Personal profile

Dr. Francesco Nex is currently Adjunct Professor (UHD1) in the Earth Observation Science (EOS) Department at the University of Twente, holding the chair of real-time analytics for ubiquitous geo-sensors.

Francesco Nex received his master degree in Environmental Engineering (2006) and his PhD degree (2010) from the TU Turin (Italy). From 2011 to 2015 he was with the 3DOM unit of FBK (Italy) working as Marie-Curie Post-Doc in the CIEM Project from 2011 to 2014 and then as Researcher. In 2015, Francesco moved to the University of Twente, before as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor at the faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), department of Earth Observation Science (EOS).

His research focuses on the development of innovative solutions fusing elements from photogrammetry, deep learning and adjacent domains such as robotics to promote the application on UAV imagery in a variety of real-world remote sensing and geomatics applications, and their geometric and semantic integration with terrestrial, airborne and satellite data. His aim is to implement  automated, real-time, and transferrable solutions to be adopted in contexts such as disaster management, infrastructure monitoring and precision farming. He was involved in several European and national research projects dealing with the use of UAV data for remote sensing applications.

He is the Chairman of the ICWG II/Ia (Autonomous sensing systems and their applications) of the ISPRS (International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) and he was PI of several different ISPRS scientific and education initiatives. He chaired more than 15 conferences and workshops and he has been serving with different roles many Editorial boards of indexed journals.

Expertise

UAV, real-time mapping, photogrammetry, deep learning, remote sensing, AI

Prizes and awards

  • ISPRS President's honorary citation 2021
  • E.H. Thomson award 2020
  • Finalist at the Licinio Ferretti Awards 2010 (supported by BLOM-CGR S.p.A.)
  • Winner at the Licinio Ferretti Awards 2011 (supported by BLOM-CGR S.p.A.)
  • Sensors (MDPI) Best Paper Awards 2013

See also: Francesco's publications on ResearchGate

Teaching

Activities in education

The duties in education cover core modules of Photogrammetry, UAV and 3D modeling in the Master Geoinformatics and modules on Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning for autonomous robots in the Master Robotics.

He is currently the coordinator of two courses:

  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Earth Observation (GeoInformatics)
  • AI for autonomous robots: deep learning and reinforcement learning (Robotics)

Other institutional roles

  • Member of the Programme Committee of the Master in Systems and Control and in the Master Robotics
  • Vice-chair of the Ethics committee (ITC Faculty)
  • Member of the University wide Ethics committee
  • Member of the EOS Management Team and Capacity Building portfolio holder

Research interests

Activities in research

Within his chair topics, the current focus is on geometric and semantic information extraction from UAV images in real-time.

Ongoing projects / activities:

Supervised PhD students

(Former) Phd supervised

Esternally supervised PhD

  • Francesco Ioli (Politecnico Milano, Italy)
  • Irene Aicardi (Politecnico Torino, Italy)

Projects

Main Projects at the University of Twente:

A leaflet describing our activities in the area of mapping from UAV at ITC can be downloaded here.

Relevant past projects:

  • RapidMap: CONCERT- Japan project (EU funded project in the International Cooperation Activities under the Capacities Programme of the F.P.7th for Research and Technology Development - http://rapidmap.fbk.eu/)
  • Galileo Project 2013-2014: Automated scene information extraction from a joint analysis of aerial remote sensing images and their photogrammetric DSM - Partner: Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP) -  GIPSA Lab, France
  • STEM Project: the project is commissioned by the Autonomous Province of Trento.
  • COSCH Project: Cost Action TD 1201 (Short Term Scientific Mission)
  • CIEM Project (Cartographic Information Extraction and Management): co-founded Marie-Curie Actions 7th F.P. - PCOFOUND- GA-2008-226070, acronym “Trentino Project”

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 2 - Zero Hunger
  • SDG 4 - Quality Education
  • SDG 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation
  • SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
  • SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth
  • SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
  • SDG 13 - Climate Action
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
  • SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals

Artificial Intelligence Expert

  • Edge AI and Sensors
  • Computer Vision
  • Smart and Service Industry
  • Mobility and Transport
  • Safe and Security
  • Economical / Environmental Impact of AI

Robotics Expert Keywords

  • Navigation
  • Perception and Cognition
  • Real-time Computing
  • Robotic Mapping
  • Autonomous vehicles

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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  • 4 Editorial work
  • 1 Membership of network