Abstract

Much of farm enterprise activity is spent dealing with pests and diseases which significantly lower the yield of produce. For many producers this warrants the use of pesticides of many kinds to deter a wide variety of pests and insects that can either destroy crops or act as vectors that cause disease. Excess use of pesticides can not only harm the plant and its soil but it is potentially harmful to those labourers applying the chemical and in the long run to those consuming the crop. There are numerous technologies, ranging from simple applications to complex innovations, that can be used to identify harmful insects. This symposium will have talks that will give insights on the new technologies in agriculture and how can we introduce automation in agriculture.

Speakers

Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns is the head of the robotics research at TU Kaiserslautern (TUKL), Germany and the previous Dean of the department of computer science at TUKL visited SEECS-NUST on 21st October, 2015, to explore short-term and long-term joint research activities in the form of joint research proposals as well as supervision of MS Thesis / FYP students.

Yasir Niaz obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tubingen in 2013. During his Ph.D. he conducted research on detection of terrain (ground surfaces) using a camera mounted on a flying and a ground robot Dr. Khan joined The University of Lahore in 2017, and has started to extend his work further. He is now Director of Research Group on Robotics and IoT that he established at the university.

Dr. Muhammad Shahzad received B.E. degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan, M.Sc. degree in autonomous systems (robotics) from the Bonn Rhein Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Sankt Augustin, Germany, and his PhD degree on radar remote sensing & image anaylsis at the department of Signal Processing in Earth Observation (SiPEO), Technische Universit채t M체nchen (TUM), Munich, Germany in 2004, 2011 and 2016 respectively. His research interests include application of deep learning for processing unstructured/structured 3-D point clouds, optical RGBD data, and very high-resolution radar images.

Dr. Rafia Mumtaz is currently working as Assistant professor in SEECS, NUST. Her first degree was in Software Engineering at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Pakistan. She pursued her Masters in Software Engineering from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. She was awarded a scholarship by NUST in 2006 for herPhD studies abroad. She joined the astrodynamic group at Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey, UK in 2006. Her research interest domains are Internet of things, machine learning, Remote Sensing, GIS, Image Processing.