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Geosense @ Bucharest Horticulture Days
📍 Between May 7–10, 2026, Dr. Dragoș Săcăleanu from GeoSense Lab participated in Bucharest Horticulture Days, organized by USAMV Bucharest – Zilele Horticulturii Bucureștene.
Geosense @ BioFEST 2026
📍 Between April 23–25, 2026, GeoSense Lab participated in BioFEST, organized by Politehnica Bucharest, where the team presented sensor-based solutions for smart agriculture and environmental monitoring.
🌱 The demonstrations included a greenhouse monitoring system capable of measuring soil and environmental parameters and automatically triggering irrigation or artificial lighting when needed.
💧 A second setup presented a distributed sensor network for larger agricultural areas, combining sensor and actuator nodes to support adaptive irrigation workflows in zones with different environmental conditions.
🛰️ The team also showcased how Earth Observation data can support crop phenology monitoring and vegetation analysis throughout the agricultural season.
Geosense @ UASMV - Spring school
📍 Between April 20–25, 2026, GeoSense Lab participated in the International Spring School on Advanced Remote Sensing – Focus on Agriculture, organized by the Faculty of Land Reclamation and Environmental Engineering within USAMV Bucharest.
📡 GeoSense contributed with sessions dedicated to wireless sensor networks, environmental monitoring, and hands-on WSN applications for agriculture.
🛰️ Additional hands-on activities focused on Earth Observation workflows for precision agriculture, including Sentinel-2 time series analysis for crop phenology monitoring using Google Colab notebooks.
🌱 The Spring School brought together students, researchers, and young professionals interested in remote sensing and digital agriculture. Part of the training materials and activities are available on the event page: GeoSense – International Spring School USAMV 2026.
🌍 The event also reflected the growing collaboration between Politehnica Bucharest and USAMV Bucharest toward future extension-oriented initiatives integrating digital technologies and applied research.
Geosense @ Polifest 2026
📍 Between March 25–28, 2026, Geosense Lab participated in the PoliFest organized by Politehnica Bucharest, where it presented its activities through an interactive stand.
💧 At the stand, the team exhibited a sensor-based irrigation system for greenhouse monitoring and control, illustrating how in-situ data (temperature, humidity, CO₂, soil parameters) can be integrated into environmental intelligence workflows.
🛰️ Demonstrations highlighted real use cases: agricultural monitoring in the Bărăgan Plain, environmental analysis in the Danube Delta, and a SNAP-based example showing changes in Lake Vidraru between March 2025 and March 2026.
🌍 The event enabled interaction with students, researchers, and industry representatives, while reflecting GeoSense’s role as an emerging extension hub connecting research, technology, and real-world applications.
Geosense @ IGARSS 2025
AI Models Powering EO Data
We are proud to announce our participation at IGARSS 2025, the premier IEEE event bringing together researchers and practitioners in Earth Observation and Remote Sensing.
This year, Geosense Lab and SIGMA Lab showcased three contributions:
🔹 R. I. Vătășoiu & D. Faur – CNN and LSTM-Based Forecasting of NDVI Trends for Environmental Monitoring
🔹 T. Costachioiu, C. Văduva & D. Faur – Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Streamline Sentinel-2 Data Description
🔹 V.M. Vasilescu, A.A. Neacșu & D. Faur – Fine-Tuning Adversarially-Robust Transformers for Single-Image Dehazing
Geosense @ AGROEXPERT
“Grassroots Innovation: From the university, directly to farmers”
We were thrilled to participate in the AGROEXPERT TV show on “Grassroots Innovation: From the University, Directly to Farmers”, broadcast by Canal 33.
🎥 Watch the full episode here: YouTube Link.
🌾 Prof. Daniela Faur and Prof. Dragoș Ioan Săcăleanu, both Fulbright-RAF Fellows, shared insights on how the U.S. agricultural extension model could inspire the future of farming in Romania. The discussion highlighted how this model — developed and refined for over a century at the University of Georgia, USA — builds strong connections between researchers, farmers, and communities.
Geosense @ AI4AGRI Summer School 2025 – EO Big Data for Agriculture
We participated in the AI4AGRI Summer School 2025 – EO Big Data for Agriculture, held between 14–19 July 2025 in Brașov, Romania.
It was a great opportunity to share our work and exchange ideas with an international community of researchers and practitioners in Earth Observation and agriculture.
📡 Prof. Daniela Faur presented EO Data Applications in Agriculture, highlighting GeoSense Lab’s innovative EO-based solutions supporting precision agriculture and environmental monitoring.
🌱 Prof. Dragoș-Ioan Săcăleanu delivered a session on In-field Environmental Parameters Monitoring, focusing on wireless sensor networks (WSN) and methods for real-time environmental data collection in agricultural settings.
Geosense promoting Applied Research and Innovation in Agriculture
🎬 The Geosense team was featured on EuroNews, in a video segment dedicated to digital transformation and innovation in Romanian agriculture.
🎥 Watch the full feature here: ▶️ Watch on EuroNews Youtube channel.
RAF Board Visit at POLITEHNICA Bucharest: Building Partnerships with Impact
We were honoured to welcome the Romanian-American Foundation (RAF) Board at POLITEHNICA Bucharest.
🔹 This visit reaffirmed the strength and continuity of a strategic partnership built over the years — one that extends far beyond the Fulbright-RAF Scholar Program.
🤝 Discussions reflected on the emerging initiatives in digital agriculture and university-led extension services, developed in collaboration with the UGA and the Geosense within the Campus Research Institute.
🌱 The meeting brought together POLITEHNICA Bucharest institutional leaders, researchers, and Fulbright alumni, highlighting a shared commitment to entrepreneurial education, applied research, and science with societal relevance.
💡 For Geosense, this visit marked a valuable opportunity to showcase ongoing research in AI-enabled remote sensing for smart agriculture.
Bringing the U.S. Agricultural Extension Model to Romania
📍 On June 6, 2025, Geosense had the pleasure of welcoming the University of Georgia - UGA (USA) delegation to POLITEHNICA Bucharest — a flagship land-grant university and a global leader in agricultural extension services.
🤝 This visit further strengthened the strategic collaboration between POLITEHNICA Bucharest and UGA, supported by the Romanian-American Foundation (RAF), and aligned with the goals of the Fulbright-RAF Scholar Award in Agricultural Extension and Innovation.
🇷🇴🇺🇸 Representing POLITEHNICA Bucharest, Prof. Dragoș-Ioan Săcăleanu (Fulbright-RAF Scholar 2024) and Prof. Daniela Faur (Fulbright-RAF Scholar 2025) continue the shared mission of connecting science, innovation, and service to society through digital and precision agriculture.
Geosense @ CSCS 2025
Deep Feature Extraction for Image Dataset Visualization
Our paper, “Exploring Image Dataset Structure through Deep Feature Extraction and Dimensionality Reduction”, was co-authored by Ana-Mihaela Vasilevschi, a talented master's student from the SIVA program (ETTI), and Daniela Faur.
By extracting deep features with ResNet50 before applying PCA and t-SNE, the study achieves improved visualization of complex image datasets.
This research is part of our broader effort within Geosense Lab, where we explore explainable AI and visual analytics for satellite and environmental data. Understanding high-dimensional structures is key to advancing our geospatial applications, as it enables the extraction of intrinsic and insightful patterns hidden in the data.
Geosense @ ESA–NASA FM4EO 2025 AI Foundation Models for Earth Observation
We are proud to share GeoSense Lab’s participation at the ESA–NASA International Workshop on AI Foundation Models for Earth Observation (FM4EO 2025), held between 5–7 May 2025 at ESA–ESRIN, Frascati, Italy.
🎓 Corina Văduva presented our paper
“Leveraging Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enhanced Sentinel-2 Data Analysis.” The work explores how LLMs and RAG architectures can improve the interpretation and semantic enrichment of Sentinel-2 imagery, opening new directions for explainable and interactive EO applications.
🌍 Participation in FM4EO reflects our continued engagement in shaping the next generation of AI4EO methodologies— bridging large language models, multimodal AI, and geospatial data fusion for advanced Earth Observation research.
Geosense @ VMU
Teaching Digital Agriculture in Lithuania
📍 Between May 5–9, 2025, Dr. Daniela Faur participated in the Staff Teaching Week at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.
🎓 Dr. Faur delivered the course “Digital Solutions in Agriculture: Data Visualization and AI Applications” to 2nd-year students of the VMU Agriculture Academy, focusing on key components of precision farming — spectral reflectance of plants, vegetation indices, remote sensing data processing workflows, management zones, and AI-based phenology forecasting.
🌍 This Erasmus+ teaching mobility highlighted the importance of academic exchange, intercultural dialogue, and European cooperation in addressing the digital transformation of agriculture.
