Tutorial Session

With the advent in precision agriculture and recent ICT techniques, many novel solutions to assist farmers have been devised over the decade. Our work in this direction focuses on few key areas which includes disease detection in plants, hydroponics using machine learning and IoT techniques, pest detection, digital soil health map generation using multispectral and hyperspectral imagery, and agricultural robots for diverse automation tasks. 

Few applications also focused on developing a real-time software from a machine learning model. The disease detection application focused on an in-field cucumber leaf diseases which primarily used few deep neural networks and IoT for sensor-based monitoring. Disease detection in a hydroponics environment has also been experimented to epitomize the efficacy of machine learning and IoT in hydroponics applications. Pest detection focused on usage of advanced deep neural networks in order to detect diverse kind of crop pests and insects. Digital soil health mapping is a recent area of research and identifying soil health indicators through hyperspectral and multispectral imagery has been studied and experimented. In order to ease the farmers with a lot of automations, our current research is focusing on developing agricultural robots. This presentation shall explain all the current research ongoing in the direction of converging machine learning with precision agriculture. 

Keywords: Precision Agriculture, Agriculture 4.0, IoT, Machine Learning, Deep Neural Networks, Hyperspectral Imaging, Multispectral Imaging, Remote Sensing.

Dr. P.A.HarshaVardhini, professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication, Vignan Institute of Technology and Science, Telangana has 20 years of teaching experience. She pursued her Ph.D in VLSI Design from the department of ECE, JNTUH. Her research interests include VLSI, FPGA architectures, Soft Computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning.

-She is author of over 116 publications in various journals and conferences at national and International level including SCI, SCOPUS, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier and UGC. She holds 3 patents, 9 Books/Book chapters. 

-She is Fellow IEI, Fellow IETE, Senior Member IEEE (SMIEEE) & WIE member. She is a Life member of ISOI, IAENG, IAOE, STRA. 

– Her achievements include NPTEL STAR AWARD 2022, NPTEL STAR AWARD 2021, NPTEL STAR AWARD 2020, Best citizen gold medal award, Best Teacher Award (Uttam Acharya Award), Women Researcher Award, Best Thesis Award, Best Paper Awards from IEEE Conference committees. Received Rashtrapthi Award from President of India. She organized various FDPs, workshops, International webinars as coordinator and convener and Chaired sessions at various prestigious IEEE and Springer conferences. She is editor and reviewer of renowned International SCI, IEEE, UGC, SCOPUS Journals and various IEEE/Springer international conferences. 

Administrative Positions : Dean IQAC, Head of the Department, Dean Alumni Affairs, Governing Body Member, ECE Department Advisory Committee Member, Executive Council Member.

Dr. Vijaylaxmi Biradar currently holds the position of Director, IQAC in Kalinga University, Raipur. She has completed her Phd from Gitam University, Visakhapatnam in the year 2016.

With over 80 research papers to her name on topics ranging from image processing, robotics and IOT, Dr. Vijaylaxmi sure has carved a niche for herself in her field. An active senior IEEE member since 12 years, she has meticulously handled the positions of Chairperson ( WIE hyderabad section) and analysis manager ( R10 WIE). She was also selected as volunteer and exemplary volunteer for IEEE WIE – ILC at San Jose, USA in 2017 and 2018.

She was granted research and consultancy projects worth 50 lakhs from SERB, Govt. of India, epics in IEEE, SIGHT/HAC, IEEMA, IEEE CSS, Unnat Bharat abhiyan. She also has 2 patents to her name. 

A passionate and Hardworking person, Dr. Vijaylaxmi has many other feathers to her cap and one will run out of pages in an attempt to describe her illustrious career.