George Kotelly, Editor in Chief
[email protected]
The first European Machine Vision Business Conference will be held in the Hotel Majestic (www.hotelmajestic.es), Barcelona, Spain, May 23 to 24, 2003. It will mark the inauguration of the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA; emva.org). This technical group aims to serve as a unified European industry lobby. It will establish a new networking framework for the European machine-vision and image-processing industry for the exchange of expertise, information, and news, and for mutually supporting business interests, concerns, and needs.
The two-day business conference, organized by Manfred Hock, managing director of the VDMA (German Engineering Federation, Machine-Vision Group, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; www.vdma.org), will feature distinguished industry professionals from Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom. These industry experts will discuss both the technical aspects of major machine-vision technologies, such as robotics, vision-sensor analysis, surface inspection, illumination, 3-D vision systems, and vision software, and the size and impact of the machine-vision market for such technologies and products in various European countries.
The EUTIST-IMV, a European Commission-supported initiative, will present guidelines on how European companies can innovate and improve their businesses by using machine-vision technology. A presentation by A. Soini of the Satakunta Polytechnic (Pori, Finland; www.spt.fi/osata) will discuss the commission's 23 pilot projects in which technology providers and users are collaborating to improve business processes.
The EMVA will hold its inaugural conference for those attendees wishing to learn about and join the association. During that time, others can visit four combined workshops and technical conferences on machine vision. These sessions will cover European projects, standardization, project management, and state-of-the-art sensors and illumination technologies.
