EMILI is working on “some pretty aggressive moon-shots on what we think we can do for the digital agriculture economy in Manitoba,” says Martin Cash in the November 4 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press.
The University of Winnipeg, in partnership with Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative (EMILI), received about $2.5 million from Western Economic Diversification to develop, among other things, labelled data sets of weed and crop images.
Such data sets — with hundreds of thousands of labelled images — could eventually be used to develop machine-learning algorithms that could allow farmers to spray herbicides only of the weeds, saving money on inputs and saving the environment on minimizing spraying.
At an EMILI-sponsored virtual conference on Wednesday called Enlightened Agriculture, the provincial and federal governments came up with another $630,000 for EMILI to strengthen collaborations between industry and academia to ensure greater alignment in developing skilled workers for this new digital ag tech era.
Read the full story, published Wednesday, November 4, 2020 in the Winnipeg Free Press.