From Jude Chinedu, Enugu
A research group at the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), High Performance and Intelligence Computing (HiPIC), has secured a $110,000 grant for the development of smart agriculture in Nigeria.
The grant was awarded by the Lacuna Fund which is made of funders like the Rockefeller Foundation, Canada’s International Development Research Centre and Google as an initiative to close the lack of dataset in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Speaking during a one-day workshop on Sustainable Smart and Integrated Catfish Soilless Farming, recently at the university, the Lead Researcher, Collins Udanor, said the group wrote proposal for the grant having in mind how to deploy Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture, particularly fish farming.
Udanor, who is of the department of Computers Science at the university, said: “The call for proposals was just released in September 2020. After studying it, I assembled a team. We followed the instructions diligently, and improved on our previous proposal.”
Speaking further on the datasets, a principal collaborator in the project, Nelson Ossai, of the Fisheries Science and Aquaculture Research Unit, Department of Zoology and Environmental Biology, UNN, revealed the datasets have been licensed under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attributions.
He also said they have been made available to the global research and agricultural community on the Kaggle dataset repository for machine learning.
Also speaking at the event, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Charles Igwe, commended HiPIC for working to advance efforts towards eliminating hunger in Africa.