Wrapping up the first year with a BiCIKL ride in Seville

BiCIKL Seville Meeting

One year after the debut of the BiCIKL Project, partners and research infrastructures will meet all together in person for the first time. A three-day of presentation of the tasks completed, bilateral meetings and technical forums will take place in Seville (Spain) between 2 – 4 May 2022.

“We are all thrilled about this convention,” Project Coordinator Prof Lyubomir Penev comments. “It is going to be a huge step forward and an important moment for planning the activities to come.”

During the meeting, which will be held at La Casa de la Ciencia, Seville, LifeWatch ERIC and GBIF will be presenting The Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), a structure at the core of the BiCIKL Project.

“We can’t reveal much before the meeting,” – says Christos Arvanitidis, LifeWatch ERIC CEO, “but BKH will be a single knowledge portal that helps researchers access and use interlinked and machine-readable FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) relying on unique stable identifiers on specimens, genomics, observations, taxonomy and data in publications.”

There will be much more in the Andalusian venue: technical discussions will take place on linking between data classes, for instance, and the event will be wrapped up with a Forum on the BKH and the Fair Data Place.

Follow the project on Twitter for continuous updates with the hashtag #BiCIKL_H2020

Doctoral Thesis Defence on AI, Biodiversity and Sustainable Ecosystem Management 

AI biodiversity

On 27 April 2022, a presentation of a doctoral thesis by doctoral candidate Francisco Pérez-Hernández, entitled “Pre- and Post-Processing Strategies in Deep Learning for Multi-class Problems in the Field of Security and Biodiversity” took place at the “Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática” (ETSII) of the University of Granada. This thesis is one of the results of the Thematic Centre on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning, and High Mountains Ecosystems, under the umbrella of the so-called LifeWatch ERIC SMART ECOMOUNTAINS Andalusia ERDF project, hosted by the University of Granada as one of the distributed facilities engaging with LifeWatch ERIC.

This is an outstanding milestone in the application of state-of-art AI and Deep Learning techniques in, e.g., advanced satellite image processing for the study of biodiversity and ecosystems, to be made available to the scientific community and environmental decision makers in the form of a LifeWatch ERIC Virtual Research Environment.

Among those attending the defence were the doctoral tutors, supervisors and member of the evaluation committee: Juan Miguel González-Aranda, LifeWatch ERIC CTO, Enrique Herrera Viedma, Vice-Rector for Research and Transfer of the University of Granada; Siham Tabik, Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; Francisco Herrera Triguero, Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Granada; Domingo Alcaraz Segura Professor at the University of Granada; Juan Mario Haut Hurtado, Professor at the University of Extremadura,  and Gloria Ortega López, Professor at the University of Almería.