Topic: Agriculture
The Startup Life: Meet R2-Weed2
October 9, 2019 at 7:00pm
Technology-driven agricultural experimentation. Iterative product testing. Validated machine learning. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Welcome to the ag-tech startup world of Teric Greenan and Nexus Robotics .
With Nexus Robotics , Teric is applying Artificial Intelligence to building a reliable and cost-effective way to produce crops. Their autonomous robot R2-Weed2 is capable of cutting and spraying weeds, fertilizing crops, and collect data about growing conditions. Teric will talk about his team’s start up journey, and the amazing technological innovations they are applying to revolutionize agriculture as we know it.
Teric Greenan
Teric grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He ran a small vegetable farm in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia for three years. He observed there were a lot of repetitive tasks on farms that were consuming farmers’ resources. These repetitive tasks seemed like good candidates to be automated. After talking with other vegetable farmers, it became clear that weeding was a massive problem that could be solved by a robot. In May of 2017, Teric founded Nexus Robotics with his close friend who is a computer engineer, Jad Tawil. Teric’s experience on the farm has been valuable for guiding product development at Nexus.
Ag + Tech = Innovation
February 12, 2019 at 7:00pm
Agriculture globally is a 12 trillion dollar annual industry ripe for technology startups looking to bring new hi-tech innovations to market. Where does digital technology and agriculture meet, and what are the opportunities?
Gary Morton (Morton Horticultural Associates, Annapolis Valley Chamber of Commerce Agriculture Committee) will discuss this exciting technology space, and the over $160,000 (cash and in-kind services) that the AVCC has awarded locally to spark agriculture innovation. Dr. Danny Silver (Acadia Institute for Data Analytics) will look at the opportunities around ag. and the field of data analytics. Finally, we will also explore the locally grown startup FoodByte, and how they are making big waves in the ag. tech space.
Forecasting: Using Machine Learning Techniques in Energy, Environment and Agriculture
January 10, 2017 at 7:00pm
Dr Daniel Silver will review a series of projects undertaken by the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics . These amazing projects can estimate crop yield from smart phone images, do solar energy forecasting, manage building energy, determine stream flow rate and aquifer recharge prediction, sales forecasting, and classifying objects in UAV agriculture field images.
Many of these problems utilize high resolution observed and forecasted weather, high definition and multi-spectral digital images, and 5 minute through 60 minute data flow rates. These projects use a variety of machine learning methods. Come learn about standard neural networks, random forests, more advanced deep and recurrent neural networks, as well as transfer learning.
The Startup Life: Feel The Frost Byte
December 13, 2016 at 7:00pm
Business-hypothesis-driven experimentation. Iterative product releases. Validated learning. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Welcome to the tech startup world of John Frost .
From the early days of Frostbyte Interactive, Aerhyve Aerial Technologies, and now PrecisionHawk, John’s pursuit of innovative products and services in the digital tech space runs years long. Join us for a fireside chat with John where we will explore the inner working of a person committed to the startup life. We will examine his failures, study lessons learned from the startup trenches, and most importantly celebrate his successes.
Dr Daniel Silver
Dr. Daniel L. Silver is the Director of the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics . He is also a Professor in and currently the Acting-Director of the Jodrey School of Computer Science at Acadia University. His areas of research and application are machine learning, data mining, and data analytics. His expertise is in Lifelong Machine Learning and Transfer Learning. He has published over 65 scientific papers and has co-chaired or been part of program committees for a number of national and international conferences, seminars and workshops on data mining and machine learning. He was the President of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC) from 2009-11. In 2011, he received the Science Champion Award from the Nova Scotia Discovery Center for his work on youth robotics and the advancement of STEM education. In December, 2014, he became an Honorary Colonel in the RCAF attached to 14 Wing Software Engineering Squadron, in Greenwood, NS. In June of 2016, was awarded Canadian AI’s Distinguished Service Award. Danny has over 30 years of experience in information technology, project management and business administration. Since 1993, he has worked on machine learning and data mining projects in the private and public sector providing situation analysis and problem definition, project management and guidance, and data mining services.
Gary Morton
Gary is a business development consultant/coach that for over 30 years has worked with farms, business and organization clients to find and develop new value added ideas, profit and success from what they do. This includes product development, commercialization, business planning, market development (domestic and export), product launch, training programs and managing business growth around new products and services.
HarvestHand
HarvestHand is a community platform dedicated to strengthening regional food systems. We’re passionate about supporting farms with CSA’s to become more profitable using HarvestHand CSA Software, helping communities eat better through the HarvestHand Community, creating good jobs in rural communities, and building new media solutions that make sharing the harvest easier.
Our vision is to create new media solutions that strengthen regional food systems’ ability to succeed in value oriented approaches to production, distribution, consumption and community.
John Frost
John Frost is a Senior Manager, Satellite Products, at PrecisionHawk. John worked extensively in geophysical research and exploration before returning to university to complete studies in International Relations/Intercultural Studies. With broad national and international project exposure, he is a cross-cultural specialist in technology adaptation. Through the Aerhyve brand, the company focused on the analysis of UAV data with Machine Learning, providing actionable intelligence for agricultural and industrial applications. An entrepreneur and technophile, John is always pursuing opportunities which make a local-global impact.
Nexus Robotics
Nexus Robotics is a Nova Scotian technology startup, developing autonomous robotic solutions for Agriculture using machine learning. Nexus provides farmers with a reliable and cost-effective way to produce crops. The Nexus Robotics team created an autonomous machine called R2-Weed2, which uses a camera system to differentiate between weeds and crops. The machine will be capable of cutting and spraying weeds, as well as able to fertilize crops and collect data about the crop and growing conditions.