Key Takeaways – EMVA Business Conference 2024
Close to 100 attendees, most of them C-level representatives of vision tech companies met from 13th – 15th June in Gdansk/Poland at the EMVA Business Conference 2024.
During the conference breaks 130 bilateral B2B-meetings were held amongst the conference delegates, making the conference once again an exceptional place to network.
The opening Keynote speaker Sudha David-Wilp put the upcoming U.S. election in context with the question of geopolitical stability. But before doing that she pointed out 2024 marks the biggest election year in history with half of the globe at the polls. David-Wilp sees democracies increasingly challenged internally e.g. by emerging right wing parties, climate change and other topics why at the same time they want to keep the existing world order intact. In her opinion the USA is going to turn its interests more and more into the Indo-Pacific; and regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election Europe should try to speak with one voice, invest in defense, boost competitiveness and de-risk from China in order to play a role in the future world order.
A rising geopolitics player is India which was introduced by another speaker as a ‘“country of countries’ where foreign investors need to look at the peculiarities in the different states of India. Localization is the key to adapt products to suit local requirements. India currently also profits from an ‘ABC: Anything But China’ sentiment positioning itself as an alternative to China. Bottom line, it was said that the Indian economy looks like an attractive investment destination, but it is one of the most difficult markets to enter, with constant sales growth being a steady challenge. As to vision tech, only recently the Indian Machine Vision Association was founded.
In good tradition of the EMVA Business Conference also the machine vision market in the hosting country Poland was presented. Highly specialized staff; good economic growth with further investments in automation as well as an extensive scientific ecosystem with national and EU-wide programs financing R&D and automation activities support the further adoption of machine vision in Poland. This is hampered, however by still relatively low labor costs and low effectiveness of foreign expansion of Polish entities.
This conference edition also provided room for the two young machine vision companies Medabsy and VisionX to talk about the backgrounds, challenges and motivation on how their enterprises were founded.
In the technical part of the conference program a Fraunhofer IOSB presentation delivered insights in the various applications of adaptive optics, ranging from deep-space optical communications for future deep-space missions over ophthalmic applications, directed energy to astronomy with wavefront sensing and correction. Another speaker presented a vision-based solution to more precisely define the inventory of any bulk material. This was followed by a literally eye-opening speech about the potential threats for the industrial sectors that may arise from synthetic, deliberately modified data which will be ever-present and indistinguishable from authentic data and was called the ‘distrust epidemic’. Another speaker set the focus on democratizing robotics with a robotics & AI software platform to unlock the potential of robotics for millions more developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses; by following the principles of state-of-the-art performance, scalability and low cost as well as ease of use. Furthermore, an interesting contribution highlighting hyperspectral imaging presented the first hyperspectral inspection system in the food industry based on the photon counting technique capable of performing real-time chemical and physical analysis of a product to detect anomalies and foreign parts.
The presentation titled ‘Navigating embedded vision system complexities in the era of AI’ sees AI as the fuel for new vision applications which also creates new types of vision tech customers that focus on fast developments and short time-to-market. These systems often have lot of investment in the background, are usually scaled on higher volumes and differentiate with software rather than hardware. Bottom-line, these new type of customers tend to underestimate the complexity of new imaging front-end product development while the geopolitical environment supports a trend to pull the supply chain back in the western world.
The talk on machine vision as a key technology in battery production by EMVA Board Member and Basler’s General Manager GTM EMEA Arndt Bake gave a promising outlook on the potential of vision tech in this industry. It was expected that the market size of the global battery market will equal the size of the Semiconductor Market already in 2030 while currently battery factories in Europe are being built and ramping up to cover domestic European demand. Herein, the manufacturing processes and yield output have still room for optimization through use of machine vision.
How to survive risks and recognize opportunities in an uncertain world and survive the next decade of machine vision was discussed in a panel moderated by Europe Sciences´ CEO Warren Clark; with panelist from different machine vision technology approaches and company sizes giving their view.
The dedicated closing keynote of the 22th EMVA Business Conference given by Prof. Dominik Bösl vividly proved that automation has no alternative due to the long term development of the world population. With that, the future of (mobile) robotics is now and AI is going to be key. Our generation of grandchildren will grow up in daily contact with robots, making them the first generation of robotic natives.
The 23rd EMVA Business Conference is scheduled to take place 22th – 24th May, 2025 in Rome/Italy.
