Daniele De Vecchi, who has just completed his PhD at the Laboratory of Telecommunications and Remote Sensing of the Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, University of Pavia, in the past year had already collected quite a few medals in the field of Apps for mobile terminals that use and manage data acquired by Earth observation satellites.
In fact, in April he was among the winners of the MyGeoss competitive tender, organized by the Joint Research Centre of the European Union, with the "Cloopsy" App proposal for land cover validation.
This latter app was then realized and presented in Brussels in early December. In July, his proposal for a CoastalCast App on the expected evolution of the economic value of properties in coastal areas allowed him to win the participation in the Copernicus Accelerator program to guide the preparation of a business plan, and to facilitate access to investors. In September, his team and its App "Saturnalia" were the winners of the challenge "App Camp" organized by the European Space Agency at it site in Frascati, Italy. "Saturnalia" is an EO-based prediction system of wine quality, to the benefit of consumers as well as of investors in highly prized productions of the product.
The sequence of all these experiences may well have contributed to the achievement of another milestone: the participation SAP ESA Space Camp App.
The "SAP ESA Space App Camp" is organized every year in Barcelona by AZO GmbH, a private-public partnership that pursues innovation in the aerospace science and technology, formed among others by the European Space Agency, German Aerospace Agency, European Patent Office, European Commission, Airbus, and others. The initiative is sponsored by SAP, a leading company in business application software, and is hosted by the European Space Agency; it is designed to bring to the market the most promising app prototypes.
An application can only be submitted by invitation, and is still followed by a careful selection of candidates.
Daniele was indeed invited to submit an application and his proposal was among the 5 selected to participate. He will thus be in Barcelona from 26th of February to the 2nd of March, 2017 to turn his prototype App into an operational and marketable service, and to promote it at the Mobile World Congress, to be held in the Catalan city on the same dates.
