On 9th October, Ji ZHOU (周济), Professor of crop phenomics at the Plant Phenomics Research Center (PPRC, Nanjing Agricultural University China, NAU) and Earlham Institute (BBSRC, UK), was invited by Royal Society of Biology to participate and give a speech at Biology Week debate at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. This event was organized by the Royal Society of Biology. More than 400 audiences around the UK attended the conference, including over 30 Royal Society Fellows.
In a wide-ranging discussion on the subject "Can AI Save the World?", Professor ZHOU explained how AI is being applied in challenging crop research questions and agricultural problems, including using deep learning to increase crop yield as well as AI-based computer vision for crop quality prediction, so that we could feed the growing population in the near future.
Plant Phenomic, as an interdisciplinary, is a "new weapon" to promote innovations and generate novel biological discoveries. Utilising its huge crop germplasm resources, NAU is pioneering plant phenotyping research in China. NAU launched the PPRC in 2017, an independent special academic zone aiming to develop an international center of excellence in plant phenomics, big-data driven biological research, and other related -omics supporting platforms.
Panel
Chaired by Dr Aarathi Prasad, the panel comprised:
Prof Ji Zhou, Phenomics Project Leader at the Earlham Institute & Professor at Plant Phenomics Research Center, NAU China
Dr A Aldo Faisal, Senior Lecturer in Neurotechnology at Imperial College London
Prof Maja Pantic, Group Leader of i.BUG at Imperial College London
Prof Nasir Rajpoot, Professor in Computational Pathology at the University of Warwick
