September 16th, 2026 | 2:00 PM CEST
Live on Microsoft Teams.
On September 16th, the ESA Φ-Lab Collaborative Innovation Network will host a new Φ-talk. Details are below.
Meet the speaker
Vassilis Sitokonstantinou is an Assistant Professor in the Artificial Intelligence Group at Wageningen University & Research. His research focuses on advancing causal machine learning for Earth observation, with an emphasis on understanding complex agroecosystems for sustainable agriculture and food security. Before joining WUR, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia and led the AgriHUB team at the National Observatory of Athens. He holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens in machine learning for remote sensing.
Talk abstract
Applying predictive machine learning to Earth observations has proven genuinely useful in agriculture and food systems, enabling applications ranging from crop monitoring to yield forecasting. The questions that matter most for management and policy, though, are often causal, and here the same wealth of data does not carry us as far. While we can exploit this data to make highly accurate forecasts, predictive success alone cannot isolate the true effect of an intervention or tell us what would have happened otherwise. This talk explores how causal machine learning combines the vast scale of Earth observation data with the ability to reason about change. Drawing on diverse applications across the agri-food chain, Vassilis will demonstrate how intervention impacts can be quantified to support evidence-based decision-making.
Register Here!