The EMVA is preparing the 3rd European Machine Vision Forum, which will taking place in Bologna, Italy, September 5-7, 2018. The focal topic will be "Vision for Industry 4.0 and beyond". The forum is hosted by the Bologna Business School and supported by Datalogic S.P.A. as the sole sponsor.

The forum starts with an “Italian Evening” on Wednesday, September 5, where companies, institutes and universities of Northern Italy have the chance to present themselves. On Thursday and Friday, there will be plenary sessions with carefully selected contributed and invited talks, extended coffee and lunch breaks, an evening session for networking on Thursday, September 6, poster presentations as well as hard- and software demonstrations. The event will end with a panel discussion on Friday, September 7.

The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) has launched this event in 2016 to foster interaction between the machine vision industry and academic research so that innovations can be transferred into practice faster. The aim is to learn from each other, discuss the newest research results relevant for industry as well as problems from applications, learn about emerging application fields, and to discuss research cooperation between industry and academic institutes.

The European Machine Vision Forum is a new annual event of the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA). The aim is to foster interaction between the machine vision industry and academic research to learn from each other, discuss the newest research results as well as problems from applications, learn about emerging application fields, and to discuss research cooperation between industry and academic institutes. The overall aim is to accelerate innovation by translating new re­search results faster into practice.

Many conferences target either academic researchers or applied industrial developers. However, on the European level, there is no forum where research and industry can meet and network. Thus, the European Machine Vision Forum fills an important gap — building on the still continuing 20years success story of the Heidelberger Bildverarbeitungsforum (www.bv-forum.de) in Germany.

The venue for the annual event changes every year to a different location in line with the selected focal topic of the respective forum. In this way, regular participants get the benefit of becoming acquainted with major research and industrial centers in machine vision throughout Europe.

The forum is directed to scientists, development engineers, software and hardware engineers, and programmers both from research and industry.