Alessandro Annoni presently serves as President of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE). He has been working at the European Commission Joint Research Centre until April 2020 as Head of the Digital Economy Unit advancing research in support to Digital Transformation. The Unit was responsible for the European Observatory for Artificial Intelligence (AI Watch) and the technical coordination of the INSPIRE Directive aiming at the development of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure.

He graduated in Physics from the University of Milan and before joining the European Commission in 1997, he worked for two decades in the private sector managing companies specialised in Remote Sensing, Geomatics, Software and Information Systems development. He has been a chair of the Architecture and Data Committee of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and then member of the GEO Program Board.

In 2013 he has been awarded the Ian McHarg Medal of the European Geosciences Union reserved for distinguished research in Information Technology applied to Earth and space sciences. In 2016 he received the Digital Earth Science and Technology Contribution Award from the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) for outstanding contribution to advancing the development of Digital Earth. In 2020 Alessandro Annoni was honored with Lifetime Achievement Award at the Geospatial World Awards 2020