As a small nation with minimal land set aside for agriculture, Singapore is over 90 per cent reliant on imported food. To reduce reliance on imports, the government set a “30 by 30” goal where one-third of the food Singapore needs will be home-grown by 2030.
Urban farming is one such diversification strategy. At the Microsoft Azure Virtual Hackathon held from 17 April to 19 June this year, Microsoft partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) pose the challenge of ensuring crop protection in urban farming to the participating teams.
A five-person NUS team, comprising MSBA students Ashwin Bagree and Utkarsh Chaturvedi, proposed a software platform that can not only detect weed growth in real-time but predict crop yields for government agencies. The three other members are Akshaye Shenoi (Master of Computing in Information Systems), Soumyadip Ghosh (Master of Computing in Computer Science) and Tanya Talwar (Master of Science, Integrated Sustainable Design).
The students’ vision came in first at the Hackathon and clinched them US$3,000 in prize money. The team is also in discussions with UNDP to run a pilot for their software.
Called AgroVision, the solution uses drones to capture images of crop and sensors to track telemetry data such as weed growth.
The team Akshaye Shenoi (top left), Soumyadip Ghosh, Utkarsh Chaturvedi, Ashwin Bagree (bottom left) and Tanya Talwar
Scaling up the project
The students were inspired by the COVID-19 situation, which threatened Singapore’s food security, and went above and beyond the hackathon’s requirements.
They built the solution architecture so that the information can be housed in more cloud servers (Microsoft’s Azure) as the data from the farms increases. This would allow government agencies to can have a bird’s eye view of farms country-wide capturing information such as performance of the crops. The students added that the government stakeholders could even have strategic insights such as expected yield of the crops.
Their gamble paid off. Making the bold move to widen the scope of their solution impressed the judges.
Adapt and overcome
Despite their strength and confidence, the teammates encountered a massive scare on submission day. A notebook rendering their presentation video crashed.
The students quickly decided on lowering the quality of the video so that it renders faster. Fortunately, they made the deadline by the skin of their teeth – at 11.59 pm.
“We were confident that we made a strong submission, but of course the joy of learning that we actually won was surreal,” said Ashwin.
The team was also fortunate that Singapore moved into Phase Two of its circuit breaker on the last day of the competition. “Since the circuit breaker was lifted, we celebrated with a team dinner that night!” he concluded.
