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UID:76@oxon.bcs.org
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230518T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230518T210000
DTSTAMP:20230710T190051Z
URL:https://oxon.bcs.org/programme/enabling-per-plant-farming-at-scale-wit
 h-machine-learning/
SUMMARY:Enabling per-plant farming at scale with machine learning
DESCRIPTION:\nDr Tom Walters\, Head of Intelligence\, The Small Robot Compa
 ny\nSmall Robot Company is working to re-imagine farming with robotics and
  artificial intelligence to make it more efficient\, profitable and sustai
 nable. Our survey robots gather high-resolution imagery from across whole 
 fields of arable crops\, and we use the data to inform decisions on applic
 ation of fertiliser and herbicide\, generating spot-spray maps for existin
 g machinery that allow farmers to apply extra inputs to the field only whe
 re they are needed. The scale of data gathered by the robots is enormous\,
  with a typical survey of a 20 hectare field yielding a terabyte of high-r
 esolution images. We use a variety of learned models to identify each indi
 vidual crop plant and weed in a survey and to make assessments of plant bi
 omass. The relatively high cost of obtaining good-quality ground-truth lab
 els for plants\, coupled with the availability of vast quantities of domai
 n-specific unlabelled data has led us to explore semi-supervised approache
 s to training object-detection models\, making the most of the available d
 ata. In this talk I will present our research in semi-supervised learning 
 and explore some of the lessons we've learned while training models and bu
 ilding systems to work at field scale with plant resolution.\n\nBio\n\nDr 
 Tom Walters is Head of Intelligence at Small Robot Company (SRC). His team
  is responsible for analysing the data gathered by SRC's field survey robo
 ts. Tom's background is in applied machine learning\; prior to SRC he was 
 a Research Scientist at DeepMind in London working on applications of arti
 ficial intelligence to a range of problems including speech synthesis for 
 the Google Assistant. Tom joined SRC in 2021\, having found a role that co
 mbined his previous experience with a newfound interest in sustainability.
 \n\nHybrid Meeting\n\nThis event will be held both “in person” and 
 “via Zoom”.\n\n“In Person” Logistics\n\nThe “in person” meetin
 g will be held at our new meeting place: Rewley House\, 1 Wellington Squar
 e\, Oxford OX1 2JA. The meeting will commence at 7:30pm\, and an assortmen
 t of light refreshments will be available beforehand. Please register for 
 the event as usual using the Eventbrite link on the website or via MeetUp\
 , where you will be able to indicate whether you are attending via Zoom or
  in person.\n\nCOVID-19\n\nBCS is following government guidelines and we w
 ould ask attendees to continue to also follow these guidelines. Please go 
 to https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/ for more informatio
 n\, advice\, and instructions.
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://oxon.bcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/
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CATEGORIES:Hybrid Event
LOCATION:Rewley House\, 1 Wellington Square\, Oxford\, Oxfordshire\, OX1 2J
 A\, United Kingdom
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