Gabriele de Canio

Gabriele De Canio is Chief Technological Innovation Officer at e-GEOS, where he also serves as Supervisory Board Member of GAF. Concurrently, he is Vice President Geospatial Solutions & Services within Leonardo's Space Division. Gabriele leads R&D, IT, AI, architecture, and engineering activities to translate data into geoinformation products and services with an end-to-end approach.

Prior to joining e-GEOS and Leonardo, Gabriele spent more than seven years at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre as Transformation Officer, where he conceived and led ESOC's AI transformation from its inception, building and deploying a cross-functional portfolio of AI applications to serve multiple space missions. He simultaneously held the role of Coordinator of ESA_Lab@Oxford, establishing the formal partnership between ESA and the University of Oxford and leading joint research across AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems.

Gabriele holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge (DAMTP), an MSc with Distinction from Imperial College London, and a BSc summa cum laude from Politecnico di Milano. Earlier in his career he applied AI to aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics at McLaren Racing F1, and co-founded Agronomia, a start-up harnessing satellite imagery for agricultural waste estimation, which won the ESA Space for Sustainability Award. An Aspen Junior Fellow, he has delivered over 150 invited talks at international conferences.

Gabriele is driven by the conviction that space endeavours, when paired with disruptive technologies such as AI, can generate outsized impact on Earth.