The newspaper Business Day published a special issue to mark World Food Day on 16 October 2021.  Reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of “Zero Hunger” will need innovative food systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in crop health monitoring was featured in an article written by Prof. Dave Berger for this special edition.  The article is on pp 12-13 of the online issue and is available by clicking here.

AI and crop health is a growing research focus area in FABI.  Recently, an AI method called deep learning was used to quantify maize rust disease symptoms in a collaboration between Prof. Berger, Prof. Nelishia Pillay, of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria and Iowa State University, USA.

Book chapter: 

Pillay N, Gerber M, Holan K, Whitham SA, Berger DK. 2021. Quantifying the severity of Common rust in maize using mask R-CNN. In: Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing. ICAISC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12854. Rutkowski L, Scherer R, Korytkowski M, Pedrycz W, Tadeusiewicz R, Zurada J. (eds). Springer, Cham., pp 1-12.