UK farmers are beginning to appreciate the many ways in which Smart Tech, AI, Robotics and IoT can achieve enhanced productivity and greater eco-efficiency. These technologies underpin some of the most fundamental changes in agricultural working practices seen in a century. Fully automated agriculture that relies on drones, robots, and AI, may transform agriculture, but it may bring social and ethical challenges.

Speakers:

Charles Veys - Managing Director FOTENIX

Charles is co-founder of an Agri-tech spin-out focused at evolving precision farming sensing to optimise production. FOTENIX are an ability provider, enabling smart operation of agricultural machinery. They combine cameras, deploying colours of light, with machine learning to monitor crop status, such as disease, in real-time.

The focus of Charles talk will be the use of AI with machine vision and open innovation to provide online monitoring in the agricultural sector and will include case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of data-driven farming to producers.

Dr David Rose & Juliette Schillings - The promises of AI for agriculture: what are the opportunities and risks?

Artificial intelligence is one of the emergent technologies that is driving us towards the so-called fourth agricultural revolution. The applications of AI in farming are numerous, including cutting through big data to facilitate evidence-based decision-making, continuously monitoring individual animals to improve health and welfare, as well as powering fleets of autonomous robots to perform manual tasks like weeding, spraying, and harvesting. Despite the many promises, however, the application of AI in farming has a number of potential negative social and ethical consequences. In this talk, two members of the Change in Agriculture group at Reading explore the pros and cons of AI in agriculture, using case studies of autonomous robotics and precision livestock technology, and discuss how we can move towards responsible AI futures.

Agenda

17:00 Welcome and Introductions

17:05 Charles Veys - FOTENIX

17:25 Q&A

17:35 Dr David Rose and Juliette Schillings

17:55 Q&A

18:05 Speaker closing remarks

18:10 Summary and Whats next from TVAIHub

18:15 Close.

Agritech and AI: The Data Driven Future of Agriculture?