Prof. Raffaele Carli, Polytechnic of Bari, Italy
Biography: Raffaele Carli received his Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering with honours in 2002 and his PhD in Electrical and Information Engineering in 2016, both from Politecnico di Bari, Italy. From 2003 to 2004, he was a Reserve Officer with Italian Navy. From 2004 to 2012, he worked as System and Control Engineer and Technical Manager for a multinational company in the space and defense sector.
Currently, he is an Associate Professor in Systems and Control Engineering at Politecnico di Bari, where he is the technical lead for the Decision and Control Laboratory (coordinated by prof. Mariagrazia Dotoli) within the Department of Electric and Information Engineering (http://dclab.poliba.it/). He has held national qualifications as a Full Professor since 2023. Since 2022, he has served as Vice-Coordinator of the National PhD program in Autonomous Systems (http://dausy.poliba.it/phd/).
An IEEE Senior Member since 2022, he currently serves as the Mentorship Subcommittee Chair of the Membership and Student Activities Committee within the IEEE SMCS for the 2023-2024 and 2025-2026 terms. Additionally, he currently serves as the Secretary of the IEEE Italy Section Chapter CS23 of the CSS for the 2025-2026 term.
He has authored over 120 printed international publications (Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=OvXT8Y0AAAAJ&hl=en). His research focuses on developing decision and control techniques for modeling, optimizing, managing, and controlling complex, large-scale systems, particularly in smart frameworks such as industry and energy. He received the 2024 IEEE Italy Section SMCS Chapter Award for Excellence in Early Career Research.
Speech Title: To be updated
 | Prof. Siyue Li, Wuhan Institute of Technology, China（Vice Dean, H-index:42） |
Biography: Prof. Siyue Li is a Principal Scientist in freshwater carbon biogeochemical cycling and aquatic carbon emission in relation to watershed pollution. He is the vice dean of School of Environmental Ecology and Biological Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan, China. He leads an innovative institute of Yangtze Water Environment and Ecological Security focusing on inland water carbon emission and ecosystem carbon pool, as well as changing water environment and pollution control. He is a member of several national societies and professional entities in China. He is the World’s Top 2% cited research scientists 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 in the field of Environmental Sciences. He has more than 130 publications at SCI-indexed journals, with 1 hot paper and 7 highly-cited papers. He also served as guest editors of special issues in the Environmental Research, Water and Frontiers in Environmental Science.
Speech Title: To be updated
 | Prof. Jeffrey Walker, Monash University, Australia |
Biography: Jeffrey Walker is an Australian Research Council Laureate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University. He is undertaking research on soil moisture remote sensing and data assimilation, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. He is contributing to soil moisture satellite missions at both NASA and ESA, as a Science Definition Team member for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and Cal/val Team member for the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission respectively.
Professor Jeffrey Walker received his BEng(Civil) and BSurv degrees in 1996 with Hons 1 and University Medal from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and received his PhD in Water Resources Engineering from the same University in 2000. His PhD thesis was among the early pioneering research on estimation of root-zone soil moisture from remotely sensed surface soil moisture observations. He then joined NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre to implement his soil moisture work globally. In 2001 he moved to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Melbourne as Lecturer, where he continued his soil moisture work, including development of the only Australian airborne capability for simulating new satellite missions for soil moisture. In 2010 he was appointed as Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University where he is continuing this research.
His primary research ambition is to lead programs in socially relevant research that will have a positive impact on the way we take care of the environment so as to result in an improved quality of life both now and in the generations to come. He believes that the key to this is through improved earth system state and flux monitoring, prediction and reporting, in a way that is relevant to policy and decision making processes, flood and drought prediction and assessment, land and water management, national weather and climate forecasting, etc. His vision is that this goal will be realised through a combination of i) environmental sensing, ii) earth system modelling, and iii) optimal convergence of model predictions with observations through data assimilation. This is a new area of research that has gained wide spread interest over the past years.
Speech Title: Towards smart irrigation
Abstract: Soil moisture information is vital to achieving optimal water use in irrigated agriculture. Although a number of water balance models and/or point-based soil moisture measurement approaches coupled with remotely sensed crop indices are available, they all lack the ability to accurately represent spatial crop water requirements. Moreover, crop health indices such as the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index cannot differentiate between water and nutrient stress or other impacts on crop health, such as from pests and disease.
Remote sensing of soil moisture using an L-band radiometer has been proven to provide accurate soil moisture information, but currently with coarse resolution. Compared with aircraft and satellite, drone-based techniques offer a small, relatively inexpensive and autonomous platform for soil moisture remote sensing with an improved spatial resolution and sampling flexibility. Accordingly, drone-based L-band passive microwave soil moisture maps are expected to provide the spatial information needed, and when coupled with water balance models, allow not only accurate estimation of the spatial variation in soil water properties needed for water demand modelling, but also an ability to track the soil moisture content over the root zone. Armed with an accurate high-resolution map of soil water demand, variable rate irrigation can then be applied with unprecedented accuracy.
This study has integrated a drone with a single beam patch array passive microwave radiometer at L-band. Trials are being conducted in a grassland and corn field in Victoria, Australia, with the objectives to i) test the robustness of this new drone-radiometer system; ii) retrieve surface soil moisture at 10 m resolution and compare with ground sampled soil moisture; and iii) provide accurate surface soil moisture for future calibration and assimilation of a water balance model. Results from this experiment will be presented.
 | Prof. Hossein Kazemi, Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Iran |
Biography: Dr. Hossein Kazemi, Full Professor in Agroecology, Department of Horticulture, Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources (GUASNR), Gorgan, Iran. Research interests: Ecosystem services assessment; Sustainable agriculture; Assessment of agriculture effects on environment; GIS and RS applications in agroecology; Landscape ecology.
Dr. Hossein Kazemi has been recognized as one of the world's foremost scientists by the ScholarGPS International Institute. ScholarGPS evaluated scientific publications from the past five years on a global scale. The strong publication record, the impact of work and the notable quality of scholarly contributions of Dr. Kazemi has placed him in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide.In the specialized domain of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), he holds the 26th rank, while in the field of spatial analysis, he is ranked 57th. ScholarGPS is a California-based company that applies artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, and other data science techniques to its massive database of over 200 million publications and 3 billion citations to rank over 30 million scholars and 55,000 institutions worldwide.
Speech Title: To be updated
Biography: Dr. Darshit S Upadhyay is working as Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering Department since 2012. He has more than 15 SCI publications and presented more than 15 conference papers. He has received various awards and research projects. He received SERB and ACU travel grants to visit Canada and USA to present the paper. Dr. Upadhyay is the reviewer of the international refereed journals. His research interests include Biomass Gasification, Energy Conversion, and Renewable Energy. Speech Title: To be updated
Prof. DARSHIT UPADHYAY, Nirma University, India