Dr. João Valente is Assistant Professor in the Information Technology Group (INF) from the Wageningen University & Research (WUR). He received is PhD in Robotics and Automation, from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) in 2014 with cum laude and he was awarded three times for the best PhD Thesis in the academic and industrial sector. He has been working with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and field robotics for more than 15 years. His research research interests lie within Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Remote sensing. He has dedicated his career on combining these technologies to develop robust solutions for Precision Agriculture and Ecology Management. He is author of more than 50 publications in this topic.

Furthermore, he is also the head of the Social Artificial Intelligent Drones Lab (aka. Social Drones Lab) that focus on gaining more insight from the drones data with cutting-edge AI approaches, whilst also making the UAVs more intelligent and this technology more accessible. SAID Lab lon-term mission is to revolutionize the earth observation domain with autonomous aerial systems that could perform close range sensing and interaction.

Beside drones, the SAID Lab is also working on giving special powers to UAV users in order to transform them in super heroes. In 2020 the Cyborg Farmer was presented at the Dutch Design Week (DDW) in Eindhoven.

Dr. João Valente team is composed by 2 Postdoc, 7 PhD students, 1 full time researcher.  Additionally, he has graduated about 50 MSc and BSc students during his career. 

Finally, he is Principal Investigator in the NWO MARS4EARTH (Modular Aerial Robotic Systems for Sustainable Living on Earth), NWO FIELDS2COVER (Roads across the fields),  H2020 FLEXIGROBOTS (Flexible Robots for Intelligent Automation of Precision Agriculture Operations), and HORIZON ICAERUS (Innovations and Capacity building in Agricultural Environmental and Rural UAV Services).