AgriFoRwArdS Newsletter Issue 12 - April 2023 Edition

Cohort 3 MSc Graduation

This January our Cohort 3 students took a break from their first year of PhD study, and came back together in Lincoln to celebrate their successes at the MSc graduation ceremony.

Each year Lincoln run their graduation in the stunning surroundings of Lincoln Cathedral. The ceremony, where students were presented on stage and accepted their certificates, was followed by a reception in the grounds of the historic Lincoln castle.

A big congratulations to the students, who showed resilience, drive and passion throughout their MSc work, it certainly paid off!

You can read the full story on the AgriFoRwArdS Student Blog.

Celebrating the Women in AgriFoRwArdS for International Women's Day 2023

For this year’s International Women’s Day (which took place as always on the 8th March), we wanted to give a special nod to all the women who have devoted their time and energy to AgriFoRwArdS over the past 4 years.

Our Academics have a special place in the CDT, we wouldn’t be able to support our students the way we do without them. Find out more about those female academics who are currently involved in supervision of our PhD Students within the link below.

Our students are the heart of the CDT. Without their incredible work, dedication, and enthusiasm, the CDT would not be the fantastic success it is today. Our female students are of particular importance today, and we want to celebrate them and the choice they have made to work within a STEM subject (which can often be male dominated). These fabulous women have come together from the four corners of the world, to work together on the challenge of Agri-Food technology towards a better world. We really feel they are such a wonderful inspiration to the female scientists and industry leaders of the future, find out why at the link below!

Our final post this year celebrated all the other fantastic women who have supported the CDT, both forward facing and behind the scenes.

There are so many more we could mention, so thank you to all the fabulous women who really are such a wonderful inspiration to the female students, academics and industry leaders of the future!

The Quarterly Progress Meetings Continued...

Once a quarter all the CDT students get together, whether in person or online, to discuss their PhD progress with each other. This gives students an opportunity to present their work in a safe environment, meaning they can practice their presentation skills, and get feedback from their peers. These meetings are a great chance for students to get some real peer to peer support on their research.

This January was the turn of the Cohort 3 students to present. These students started their PhD study last October and so presented the work carried out in the initial stages of their research, as well as their plans for their work moving forward.

The event demonstrates the breadth of scope of AgriFoRwArdS research, which covers multiple sectors of the agri-tech domain. The session also provided a fantastic opportunity for the new Cohort of students to see different styles of presentation, different methods for asking and answering questions, as well as be introduced to the broad range of topics being covered by the AgriFoRwArdS CDT.

Karoline Visits UC Davis, California

AgriFoRwArdS Cohort 1 student Karoline Heiwolt, recently had the opportunity to travel to UC Davis in California for a research visit along with her Primary Supervisor Dr Grzegorz Cielniak (AgriFoRwArdS Co-Investigator), and two fellow PhD students from the University of Lincoln. Below, Karoline shares some of the highlights of the trip.

'The main purpose of our trip was to meet with researchers in the same field, exchange ideas, and explore potential collaborations, so we spent the majority of the week on campus, visiting research groups in the departments of Computer Science, Agricultural Engineering, Plant Sciences, and the renowned UC Davis Strawberry breeding program.'

'We also got to visit their robotics labs and see the research platforms, many of which are designed and custom-built in-house, as well as drones equipped with impressive remote sensing arrays. Finally, we all presented and discussed our ongoing work in two seminars.'

'It was a very engaging week with many fruitful discussions on familiar themes and also new insights into the distinct challenges, which the differences in scale and environment present to researchers in California. I personally gained valuable feedback and some practical advice for my own work from the exchange as well.'

'One of the highlights of our trip was catching up with Dr Taeyeong Choi, our former colleague from Lincoln, who now works as a Postdoctoral Scholar with Professor Xin Liu at UC Davis. He made us feel especially welcome for the duration of our stay in Davis and Sacramento and helped us navigate the academic landscape in the US.'

'Beyond the university visit, we also had some time to explore Sacramento and San Francisco. Of course, we visited the California State Capitol and the Golden Gate Bridge, but we also took a little detour through Mountain View to see the Computer History Museum.'

'One of the highlights of our trip was catching up with Dr Taeyeong Choi, our former colleague from Lincoln, who now works as a Postdoctoral Scholar with Professor Xin Liu at UC Davis. He made us feel especially welcome for the duration of our stay in Davis and Sacramento and helped us navigate the academic landscape in the US.'

'Beyond the university visit, we also had some time to explore Sacramento and San Francisco. Of course, we visited the California State Capitol and the Golden Gate Bridge, but we also took a little detour through Mountain View to see the Computer History Museum.'

AgriFoRwArdS Students Cook up a Storm at Spring School

The AgriFoRwArdS Summer School was moulded slightly differently this year, with it actually being held in late February/early March, and was rebadged the ‘Spring School’ (just!).

The AgriFoRwArdS Students all travelled to Lincoln week commencing 27th February, to take part in the week of activities, which were set up at the Riseholme Campus. Alongside the days filled with exciting challenges, there were also opportunities for networking, at the Spring School Dinner and social bowling. The activities themselves were inspired by this years ICRA Conference Competition, which has been created by the University of Lincoln and University of Cambridge

Each year the ICRA Organising Committee invites proposals for competitions to the held during the conference. These competitions provide a unique venue for state-of-the-art technical demonstrations from research labs throughout academia and industry. This year, Dr Marcello Calisiti(opens in a new tab) from the University of Lincoln, worked with Prof Marc Hanheide(opens in a new tab) and Prof Elizabeth Sklar(opens in a new tab) (also both from the University of Lincoln) and Prof Fumiya Iida(opens in a new tab) and Dr Fulvio Forni(opens in a new tab) (from the University of Cambridge) to put together a proposal for a robotic chef competition.

The CDT’s Spring School was a platform to develop knowledge needed for the competition. With students working together to develop the ‘robot kitchen’, students are now being encouraged to build on this, team up and enter the ICRA Competition itself.

So what did the students get up to?

Students were split into four groups, each assigned a different stage of the overall task of ‘cooking a full English’.

• Group A – Shopping – Students were tasked with programming a Tiago robot to identify different spices and sauces, pick up said sauce/spice and deliver it to the cooking station.
• Group B – Cooking – Students used a Baxter robot to pick up a bowl of beans (yes, as you can imagine, there were beans everywhere on more than one occasion!), pour it in to a pan, and then stir.
• Group C – Cooking – Students worked with a Franka arm robot, getting it to pick up a slice of bread, pop it in a toaster, and push the lever to turn on the toaster. Once the toast was done, the robot then picked up the toast and popped it on a plate.
• Group D – Serving – This group also worked with a Tiago robot, but this time, programmed it to not only move a full plate of breakfast from one location to another, but also to answer the judges questions!

Alongside the main challenge of the week, there were also two well received social evenings. The first was a student led progress review activity, where students met in the Student’s Union to discuss their research, share ideas and get some real peer-to-peer support. PhD students then spoke with MSc student about the transition to the PhD, answering any questions about that stage of the CDT. The second event was a dinner, held at Prezzo in Lincoln, where students, staff and assistants all came together to socialise, get to know each other, and build connections. Following dinner, everyone headed off to bowling for the rest of the night!

So, what did the students enjoy about the week?

I enjoyed working with robots in the realistic settings

So excited, I was attracted by the task and challenges, so i only sleep 4 or 5 hours. I was fully getting into the work

The best part of the CDT is the people

Loved the hackathon format…give us real robots and let us solve some interesting tasks

…equal amount or levels of resources and challenges provided to all teams. It was literally a hands on experience.

Thank you to everyone involved

We wanted to say a massive thank you to all of our students for their time and effort during Spring School, and in assisting us with achieving the objectives that were set out at the start of the week. What they all achieved as teams, not just with regard to the final presentation and demonstration, but also the soft skills they developed and were able to demonstrate throughout the week (team work, communication, problem solving, etc.) was excellent.

We also was to thank all the fantastic work of our support staff, without whom we could not have put together the weeks activities. With special thanks to Dr Marcello Calisti for hosting the event, and Francesco Del Duchetto, Leonardo Guevara, Omer Argin, Mithun Poozhiyil, Rob Lloyd, Andy Ham and Jonathan Cox for devoting their week to supporting our students with their technical needs.

We feel the week was worthwhile and enjoyable experience, and students were able to gather valuable skills and get networking with their fellow students. We can’t wait for next year’s Summer School!

AgriFoRwArdS Seminar Series 2022/23

The Seminar Series, which this year is being arranged by the University of East Anglia, continued this quarter, with two talks.

February 2023

In February we heard from Dr Michal Mackiewicz, Associate Professor in Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia. In his talk, titled 'From Fields to Seas - Computer Vision for Analysis of Orchard Surveys and Remote Electronic Monitoring of Fisheries', Michal talked about the colour imaging pipeline for the analysis of images from apple orchards, describing typical problems that can be encountered when colorimetric measurements of objects in the field are required.

He then presented the developed methods for colour calibration of the individual drone cameras as well as methods for discounting the influence of varying illumination on the colour appearance of the fruit. Michal then discussed the development of the CatchMonitor - an automated by-catch (unwanted catch) quantification system to be deployed on fishing trawlers equipped in a conveyor belt. He described methods for segmentation, classification, tracking and counting fish discards and present the results.

The work was funded by the past EU Horizon 2020 Smartfish project and the ongoing Horizon Europe Everyfish project.

March 2023

In early March we heard from Richard Leggett, Group Leader at the Earlham Institute.

Richard's talk, titled 'Towards in-field automated real-time analysis of biological samples using nanopore sequencing' covered the launch of the first nanopore sequencer.

The launch of the first nanopore sequencer in 2015 has facilitated entirely new ways of sensing the biological environment through DNA and RNA sequencing. Instead of collecting samples and bringing them to a lab to extract DNA and sequence on large, expensive, machines, Oxford Nanopore’s MinION sequencer makes it possible for the lab to be taken into the field and sequencing experiments carried out in situ. Along with this has come an impetus to develop new approaches for automated sample collection and preparation and for new software that can analyse data in real-time on field-deployable hardware. In this seminar, we’ll cover the basics of nanopore technology and look at how advances in automation, low power computing and new software are enabling exciting new applications of DNA sequencing technology - including in biothreat detection and environmental monitoring.

Upcoming Events

AgriFoRwArdS Seminar Series

We have two more talks scheduled in the 2022/23 Seminar Series.

• Friday 28th April - Prof Richard Bowden, University of Surrey - 'Perception for Autonomous Vehicles and Robotics'
• Friday 26th May - Dr Belinda Clark, Agri-TechE - 'title TBC'

For more information, or to sign up to attend, please email agriforwards.cdt@uea.ac.uk.

NCFM visit

Each year, the AgriFoRwArdS CDT take a trip to visit the National Centre for Food Manufacturing, which is located at the University of Lincoln’s Holbeach Campus. This year the event will take place on Tuesday 25th April, and is an opportunity to get a tour of the state of the art facilities and undertake some really interesting sessions on the topic of food and drink.

Food and drink manufacturing contributed £28bn to the UK economy in 2021, growing by 2.3% on the previous year. The industry has a turnover of more than £105bn, accounting for 20% of total UK manufacturing as the biggest manufacturing sector in the country. The importance of the industry goes beyond turnover. Food and drink manufacturing employs 430,000 people across every region of the UK and is a key part of the food and drink supply chain, which employs 4.3m people and is worth more than £120bn to the economy. (Food & Drink Federation, Dec 2020).

Sessions will cover food industry scale, structure, food system issues and opportunities for digitalisation, current position and future direction of food sector robotics and other digitalisation technologies, typical approaches & challenges and practical advice on “working with the food manufacturing sector” and “blending fundamental and applied research”.

Introduction to Agriculture: Opportunities and Challenges

(30th and 31st May) - Cohort 4 will attend Riseholme Campus for a training session covering an introduction to the role of current technologies in agriculture to help ground their research in real challenges and opportunities.

Quarterly PhD Research Progress Meeting in Norwich

The summer PhD progress review meeting will take place on 11th July, in person, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The day will include presentations from Cohort 2 and 3 CDT students from the Universities of Cambridge and Lincoln, and the day will conclude with a discussion panel (provisionally to be led by Professor Brian Reid of UEA's School of Environmental Sciences). We are really looking forward to visiting UEA and hearing from our students about their research progress.

CDT Conference/Joint Conference/TAROS

This year's AgriFoRwArdS Annual Conference is being hosted by the University of Cambridge, and it's going to be a big one! Combined with the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) Conference (which is also being hosted by the University of Cambridge this year) and the Joint Robotics CDT Annual Conference (hosted by AgriFoRwArdS), we expect over 200 delegates. The Conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on the 13th/14th September 2023.

Arrangements are currently being made, so watch this space for more information!

The AgriFoRwArdS CDT Entrepreneurship Lecture Series 2022/23

The AgriFoRwArdS Entrepreneurship Lecture Series was launched in October 2022 in response to requests from our CDT students. Organised by Amy Weatherup, a serial entrepreneur who also runs the i-Teams course at the University of Cambridge, the lectures and workshops were selected based on student feedback from a long list of possible topics.

This term we have heard from three fantastic speakers. At the beginning of February, Adelina Chalmers, The Geek Whisperer, ran an interactive workshop for our students which covered the topic of 'How to pitch your business in 3 minutes'. Students were taken through Adelina's framework for the '3-minute pitch', then each student was given the opportunity to present their own pitch. With in depth discussion after each pitch, students were able to gain valuable insight into their pitching skills.

Towards the end of February Dr Jessica Ocampos, co-founder and CEO of Camnexus, gave a talk titled, 'An inclusive approach in innovation to address global challenges : Using human-centred design in remote co-development of IoT technology during pandemic times'. In this talk, students were introduced to Camnexus and the project ‘Aquarice.io: Feasibility Study of a Demonstration of a Real-time Monitoring System of Water Irrigation Quality for Rice Smallholder Farmers in Araranguá River, Brazil’. The project demonstrated that addressing the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) could be achieved through partnership in an inclusive approach between the technology developers, the end-users and key stakeholders using a human-centred design methodology. Moreover, local innovation capability and sustainable commercialisation routes were developed.

In early March, Dr. Maggie Wilkinson and Dr. Nathalie Muller from Cambridge Enterprise spoke to the AgriFoRwArdS community about commercialisation and intellectual property (IP). They covered information about protecting IP and commercialising research outputs in a university context. The talk really highlighted the importance of thinking about the information students are sharing, and demonstrated the reasoning behind potential reluctance to talk about research in detail in public forums.

This years series concluded with a final interactive workshop 'How to communicate effectively with industry contacts'. Run by Katie Bardes, who runs her own consultancy and is an associate executive coach with the Academy of Executive Coaching, the workshop aimed to teach students about the communication skills used to gather information effectively from industry experts, and to set up a successful conversation. The workshop was a chance to learn to use questioning techniques to assess what is important within these conversations, and to practice questioning and listening skills.

Feedback from students??? AWAITING

The 3rd International Embodied Intelligence Conference

For the last 3 years, in March, the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory (BIRL) at the University of Cambridge has organised the Embodied Intelligence International Online Conference. The conference focuses on cutting edge research in one of the most advanced areas of modern science: Embodied Intelligence (EI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The conference brings together robotics engineers, philosophers, material scientists and other academics, to explore and exchange the knowledge and expertise within their research fields. The goal of the conference is to help attendees understand the deep meaning of the phenomenon that every living on our planet organism possesses - intelligence.

With the advances in EI and AI happening so rapidly, conference attendees have been trying to determine what embodied intelligence is, how we understand intelligence and what theories we have to represent it, how we can measure its complexity and what ethical complications could arise from the development of EI.

The conference ran for 3 days (22-24 March 2023), consisting of 5 sessions: 3 morning and 2 afternoon, and 50 talks by academics from the different continents. It was attended by more than 500 people from all over the world.

Professor Iida who leads the organising committee and is the Head of Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory said:

This is our third International Conference on Embodied Intelligence and our annual flagship event that attracts worldwide attention. We organise this conference for free so that all academics and students can learn more about this broad and fascinating field of research from leading researchers. They come from across the globe including the UK, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, South Korea, Sweden, Singapore, Spain, Czech Republic and other countries. Every year we widen our pool of presenters and hear about most inspiring research topics.

BIRL have announced the EI’24 International conference will be held on the 20-23 of March 2024. Information on this, and previous year's conferences, with video recordings of the talks can be found on the conference web-site.

OHMC/CDT Talks: Education is not a matter of milestones, but of key moments

With arrival of the AgriFoRwArdS CDT's 2nd Cohort of students in Cambridge, there was a great need to organise effective cohort building activities, which both enrich and widen students’ learning process.

The OHMC (Observatory for Human Machine Collaboration)/AgriFoRwArdS CDT talks, cover topics within the field of applied robotic research, from robotic applications for medical purposes to core mathematical problems behind robotic science. The series first started in October 2021 and has now been run successfully for 2 years. These talks are intended to bring together the researchers and students involved in OHMC and AgriFoRwArdS CDT projects, to learn about ongoing projects, discuss challenges and explore collaboration possibilities with other University of Cambridge departments.

In 2023, the organising team decided to make the talks available online in order to include the CDT students at the universities of East Anglia and Lincoln, as well as be wider reaching in their content.

Talks have run most Fridays, at midday. In 2023 Cambridge ran 7 talks, speakers have included current AgriFoRwArdS CDT supervisors (Dr Mukesh Kumar and Dr Somenath Bakshi) and potential industry collaborators (Cambridge Future Tech Ltd and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB).

Dr Mukesh Kumar

Dr Mukesh Kumar is a lecturer within the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is based at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and is currently leading research on industrial resilience. Mukesh’s research interest for the field of risk management and manufacturing came from his early career in the financial industry where he was responsible for corporate evaluation of investment decisions made by manufacturing companies.

In 2005 he commenced his PhD studies at IfM Cambridge, in the area of manufacturing investment decision making from risk and network resilience perspectives, to leverage and extend his specialist knowledge in this area. After completing his PhD, he worked on an industrial project funded by Sealed Air Corporation, which focused on operationalising his PhD research outcomes into a manufacturing investment risk evaluation tool, specifically focusing on plant location decisions and technology selection.

Mukesh managed to secure departmental funds to extend his work on risk, resilience and sustainability, which were emergent fields in the area of manufacturing and supply network research. This promising line of research enabled him to then secure a further grant from Three Guineas Trust in 2013 to explore “climate change implications for global food supply chains” in collaboration with IfM, 4CMR and British Antarctic Survey.

Since that time Mukesh’s research has included food product safety management from developed and developing country perspectives, risk evaluation in pharmaceutical supply, and environment sustainability assessment in global supply networks in four sectors - food, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace.

His research continues to focus on sustainability and resilience, but closely related to the emerging manufacturing paradigm of “Distributed Manufacturing”. Mukesh is supervising Garry Clawson, a Cohort 3 AgriFoRwArdS CDT student who was afforded a studentship by the Dyson Foundation and works closely on his PhD research with Dyson Farming.

Current projects run by Dr Kumar’s research Group:

• “UK-India Food Supply Chains: Sustainability and Food Security” in collaboration with ABV-IIITM Gwalior, funded by UKIERI
• “Engineering Driven Sustainable Supply Network” with IIT Ropar and IIM Lucknow, funded by the EPSRC and DST
• “Risk and Resilience of Global Supply Networks and Future Industrial Systems”, funded by CIM
• RE-configuring MEDIcines End-to-end Supply, AMSCI project

Jack talks to us about his collaboration with Dyson

Each of our students work closely with an Industry Partner as part of their PhD research. These industry partners co-create the PhD projects our students undertake, often sharing their specific challenges with our students, who then focus on working to solve the issue. Each student's core supervisory team includes an advisor from their industry partner, promoting a strong relationship between student, academic and industry member. This creates a wonderful platform for discussion and sharing knowledge.

This arrangement benefits our academics, the industry and students alike. Why not hear for yourself? Jack Foster, who is currently in his second year of PhD study at the University of Cambridge, speaks blow about what it is like to work with Dyson Farming.

Dyson have been great, actually. For me, the most immediately useful thing is that I talk to my industry mentor fairly regularly about ideas and such, as he offers a different set of expertise/interests compared to my primary supervisor. It also has been really nice just having a large organisation take interest. I've given presentations to them two or three times now - as well as producing a video with college. I think this stuff is nice because it gives a sense of value and meaning to the work, but also (in the case of the presentations) I've got a lot of different feedback from people in all sorts of positions at Dyson.

Hai Hui and I also visited the farms, which helped add context and identify potential issues that I could address in my research.

Want to know more about our industry engagement, visit out webpage 'Reasons to engage with AgriFoRwArdS' here.

Bradley Hurst – Research visit to Jersey Farms

AgriFoRwArdS Cohort 2 student Bradley Hurst, recently had the opportunity to visit Jersey again as part of his industrial sponsorship with Jersey Farmers’ Union to progress his research in new active robot perception solutions for the automation of potato planting. In this blog post, Bradley shares some of the highlights of the trip.

LIAT attend FPC Event

On Thursday 16th March the Fresh Produce Consortium’s (FPC) agri-tech event took place at the East of England Showground in Peterborough. The Lincoln Institute of Agri-food Technology & Lincoln Agri-Robotics were proud to be sponsors of the event. The day featured two main events one being the industry focussed FPC Future focussed on the latest developments in the fast-evolving sector. The other event was FPC Careers which showcased career pathways into the fresh produce sector. The split event provided a huge number of potential opportunities for both seasoned professionals and newcomers to the industry.

The day played host to over 80 exhibitors ranging from large multinational companies to smaller independent start-ups. The event space was a bustling hub of experts, researchers, students, and company representatives from across the fresh produce sector. Panels and talks running throughout the day offered insights into industry challenges and developments, with LIAT’s own Professor Simon Pearson, David May and Carolina Camacho Villa being active participants in several panels.

Overall, it was a fantastic day brimming with showcases, networking, and collaboration for the LIAT team.

Find out about the other research ongoing within the agri-food technology sector at Lincoln - https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/liat/research/roboticsandautomation/

Let us know if you have any interesting research, publications, or outreach opportunities to share, email agriforwards.cdt@lincoln.ac.uk!

If you have any comments, information or news you wish to share with the AgriFoRwArdS community, please do get in touch - We'd love to hear from you.

The AgriFoRwArdS CDT Delivery Team - agriforwards.cdt@lincoln.ac.uk

Visit us on the web at www.agriforwards-cdt.ac.uk and don’t forget to subscribe to the AgriFoRwArdS CDT YouTube channel, and follow us on LinkedIn.