Agricultural Internet of Things and Decision Support for Precision Smart Farming

Authors

Annamaria Castrignano Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Italy. Annamaria Castrignan� is a research director at the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics in Bari (Italy). She has been actively involved in the discipline of pedometrics and digital soil mapping for many years. Her knowledge and expertise in geostatistics and statistics has been exemplified in several oral presentations in International conferences and peer-refereed journal articles (she has published more than 250 papers). She has been the scientific leader of national and international projects aimed at the application of precision farming to the cultivation of durum wheat and tomato in Southern Italy and at the use of proximal and remote sensing in agriculture. She has been giving several basic and advanced courses on geostatistics to national and international PhD students and researchers in Italy and abroad. She is currently involved in the implementation of multivariate geostatistical techniques of data fusion with proximal and remote sensors. Gabriele Buttafuoco Senior Researcher, Bio-Agro Food Sciences Department, National Research Council, Italy. Gabriele Buttafuoco is senior researcher in the National Research Council of Italy. His research focuses on the application of statistical and geostatistical methods for the purpose of analysing soil properties variability, modelling soil processes, delineating management zones for precision agriculture, hydrology and water resource management. He is also involved in proximal soil sensing, chemometrics, and data fusion. On these topics, he has published several articles in international journals and conference proceedings. He is Associate Editor for Environmental Earth Sciences and member of the Editorial Board of the journal Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science. He is member of International Society of Precision Agriculture, International Union of Soil Science, Italian Soil Science Society, and European Water Resources Association. Raj Khosla Colorado State University, USA. Raj Khosla is Robert Gardner Professor of Precision Agriculture. His main research focus has been on "Management of in-field soil and crop spatial variability using innovative technologies for variable rate precision nutrient and water management. He has generated many discoveries in precision agriculture, most widely recognized among them is the innovative technique of quantifying variability of spatially diverse soils using satellite based remote sensing to create management zones, which is currently being used by farmers in Colorado, across US and in other countries around the world. In 2012, he was named the Jefferson Science Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and previously in 2008, he was named the Colorado State University Monfort Professor. He is the Fellow of (i) American Society of Agronomy; (ii) Soil Science Society of America; (iii) Soil and Water Conservation Society and (iv) Honorary Life Fellow of International Society of Precision Agriculture. Dr. Khosla is the Founder and Past-President of the International Society of Precision Agriculture. Dr. Khosla is involved with quantifying and managing spatial variability of soils by precise crop input management in an environmentally sensible manner. Currently, Dr. Khosla is evaluating different techniques of delineating and managing "production level management zones�. In addition, he is evaluating remote sensing techniques to quantify crop stress conditions for nitrogen in irrigated corn, and detecting weeds in dryland no-till fields. Abdul Mouazen Professor, Ghent University, Belgium. Abdul Mouazen, specializing in proximal soil sensing for precision agriculture and environmental applications, is a patent holder of a mobile soil sensor that can analyse the composition of the soil by means of infrared spectroscopy. During his past 9 years employment at Cranfield University (UK), several pioneering precision agriculture applications of this innovative sensor were achieved.
In the start of 2017 he started his new position at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University, where he will carry out a project titled: Towards Establishing a Centre of Site-specific Technology for Soil and Crop Management (SiTeMan). The aim of the project is to establish a research platform combining cutting-edge soil and crop sensors, modelling and system control technology for managing farm resources site-specifically, with the final goal of establishing a precision agriculture centre in Flanders. Dimitrios Moshou Associate Professor, Head of Agricultural Engineering Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.), Thessaloniki, Greece. Dr. Dimitrios Moshou is an associate professor at AUTH and has a PhD from the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Biosystems, Faculty of Engineering, K.U. Leuven, Belgium, an MSc in control systems from the University of Manchester, and an MSc in electrical engineering. His research interests include the theory and applications of bio-inspired information processing, neuroscience, self-organisation, and computational intelligence and their use in intelligent control, pattern recognition, data fusion, and cognitive robotics. Application areas include mechatronics and non-destructive quality control and monitoring of bio-products and crops. He co-authroed the research monograph "Artificial Neural Maps� on self-organizing networks and learning schemes and has written more than 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and reviewed international conference proceedings, resulting in over 1500 citations. He has contributed in research and management tasks of 24 local and EU research projects. He has been involved in the proposal preparation, management, and research of several EU projects involving smart optical sensors, data fusion, and computational intelligence techniques. He was co-recipient of the Phytofare Prize 2001 for "Development of a weed activated spraying machine for targeted application of herbicides.� Olivier Naud ITAP, Irstea, Montpellier SupAgro, University, Montpellier, Montpellier, France. Olivier Naud is with Irstea,National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, formerly Cemagref, since 1990. He received the Ph.D degree in control and automated systems from the INSA in Toulouse in 2003. Today, he is conducting his research in ITAP lab in Montpellier and started his career in Irstea Antony. He graduated as an engineer in control and sensing systems in 1988, and also holds a university license in econometrics.
His research is related to modelling of processes and decision systems, and more specifically modelling and verification of discrete event systems as well as optimisation. The application domains are precision agriculture, crop protection and environment. Olivier Naud has inclination for interdisciplinary research.