The University of Ferrara (UNIFE) was founded in 1391, and it is one of the oldest in Italy. It consists of thirteen Departments, approximately 28.000 Bachelor, 695 Master and 440 PhD students, and approximately 1300 permanent academic and administrative and tech staff people.

UNIFE has been awarded with two UNESCO Chairs: “Urban and Regional Planning for Sustainable Local Development” and “Education, Growth and Equality”, and has contributed to 42 FP7 projects (4 as coordinator), 46 Horizon 2020, 4 as coordinator and 8 Individual Fellowship Marie Skłodowska-Curie, 17 Horizon Europe, and several projects funded by other EU programmes.

The Department of Environmental and Prevention Sciences (DEPS) is an innovatively multidisciplinary department at the University of Ferrara that focuses on the design of massively parallel architectures, and on the optimization of scientific-applications exploiting big data and AI techniques on top of cloud computing. The DEPS will contribute to the MESEO project with the development of the AI-based GPU-boosted application for crop detection and classification, one of the green-deal applications developed by the project, as enabler for the adoption of sustainable management practices in agriculture.