News | Monday, 6th January 2020
Success at third international workshop on precision agriculture
Academics are investigating the loss of crops due to pests and diseases - and the impacts of this on the world's food supply.
The Third International Workshop on Precision Agriculture: Data Driven Approach to Crop Monitoring and Disease Diagnosis took place towards the end of last year. Academics, lead by Liangxiu Han from the Department of Computing and Mathematics, headed to Beijing, China, for the event.
The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in computer science, plant science, and remote sensing. The main aim of the workshop was to showcase work towards a data-driven decision support platform for crop disease detection using multiple data sources including satellite, drone and smartphone imagery.
At the workshop, attendees were able to discuss and exchange ideas, specifically between academia and industry, to help understand current needs. It was also the perfect chance to establish long-term working partnerships and identify commercial opportunities.
The workshop included two sessions, networking and technical.
In the technical session, 12 speakers presented strengths of the research - paying particular attention to the automatic crop disease diagnostic machine being developed by Manchester Met and their Chinese partner.
In addition to this, speakers from industry gave talks in relation to crop disease monitoring and the need for data driven approaches, and how these approaches can be applied to agriculture.
During the networking session, the potential funding and commercial opportunities were explored further.
In attendance, there were 27 participants representing a variety of organisations.
Overall, the workshop was a success and supports the ongoing research and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funded projects, EPIC and Cropdoc, which in total are worth more than £1.5 million.
