Danilo Demarchi
Let the Plants do the Talking: Smart Agriculture by the messages received from Plants and Soil
Danilo Demarchi
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
ABSTRACT
As analysed in the report recently issued by the United Nations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC Report 2021), the benefits that technology provides to a green and sustainable economy are highly appreciated and under intense research and development globally. Circuits and Systems (CAS), which are the base for any system, can bring the needed functionalities and performances for reaching eco-friendly, circular and practical solutions.
The IoT active connection in agriculture (as an example in Europe) are exponentially increasing, proving that Precision Agriculture is a very fast-growing research field, where more controlled quality production, water use optimisation, and a lower spreading of pesticides and fertilisers are some key issues, serving the improvement of food quality, but also helping the respect of agriculture for the environment.
For reaching these targets, electronics are the perfect tool for interfacing the data sources, extracting the data and processing them, and obtaining the needed information along the whole food chain: from the farmer, and the professional stakeholders to the consumers.
In the Keynote, an overview of electronics for precision agriculture will be presented, analysing the possible solutions that can bring important innovations, advancing the actual strategies based on remote or indirect measurements, by instead in-place measuring the plant and soil parameters (a.k.a. Let the Plants do The Talking), associated with more standard information derived from environmental conditions.
Application scenarios for crop monitoring, water control, information communication and decision support will be presented. In particular, will be analysed technologies for reaching the needed levels of low power and low cost, and the efficient ones to be applied to AgriFood at the global scale, supporting also food security and sustainability.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Full Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications.
Micro&Nano Electronics, Smart System Integration and IoTs for the AgriFood Value Chain and for BioMedical Devices.
Visiting Professor at EPFL Lausanne (2019) and at Tel Aviv University (2018-2021).
Visiting Scientist (2018) at MIT and Harvard Medical School for the project SISTER (Smart electronic IoT SysTEms for Rehabilitation sciences).
Author and co-author of 5 patents and more than 300 scientific publications in international journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
Leading the MiNES (Micro&Nano Electronic Systems - http://mines.polito.it) Laboratory of Politecnico di Torino and coordinating the Italian Institute of Technology Microelectronics group at Politecnico di Torino (IIT@DET).
Founder and Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on AgriFood Electronics - TAFE (https://ieee-cas.org/publication/ieee-transactions-agrifood-electronics).
Founder and General-Co-Chair of the IEEE Conference on AgriFood Electronics - CAFE (https://2023.ieee-cafe.org).
Founder and Vice-Chair of the IEEE CAS Special Interest Group on AgriFood Electronics.
2023-2024 Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE CAS Society with the Lecture "Let the Plants Do the Talking: Smart Agriculture by the messages received from Plants and Soil".
Member of the IEEE Sensors Council and the BioCAS Technical Committee. Associate Editor of the IEEE Open Journal on Engineering in Medicine and Biology (OJ-EMB).
General Chair of IEEE BioCAS (Biomedical Circuits and Systems) Conference in 2017 in Torino and founder of IEEE FoodCAS Workshop (Circuits and Systems for the FoodChain).
TPC Co-Chair of IEEE ICECS 2019, IEEE BioCAS 2021 and IEEE BioCAS 2022 conferences. General Co-Chair of IEEE BioCAS 2023.
Organizer of the 3rd Seasonal School on AgriFood Electronics: Smart Technologies for a Sustainable Agriculture in Torino, September 2022.
