Advance.io is partnering with Innovation Africa @UP to bring artificial intelligence and big data techniques to the continent’s agricultural and forestry sectors. The partnership will see the development of the Information Hub, a cloud-based national scientific repository with associated tools and models to support the digitalisation of these sectors. This platform will connect research and practitioner communities across South Africa, and eventually, further across the continent. It will allow the harnessing of the power that lies at the intersection of biotechnology, sensor technology and big data analytics. The scope of the project includes database warehousing, biosecurity management and surveillance systems, predictive tools (eg. plant pathogen diagnostics or disease outbreaks based on remote sensing), photo imagery analysis and machine learning. FABI’s diagnostic clinic data base forms an integral part of this new project.

Innovation Africa @UP is a research-investment platform built by the University of Pretoria that hosts and develops government-industry-university research partnerships to address national and pan-African needs for sustainable development and economic growth. Advance provides professional services over the entire spectrum of IT development disciplines with complementary services such as Internet of Things and related component manufacturing.