Information and Communication Technologies for Agriculture—Theme I: Sensors

Dionysis Bochtis works on the field of engineering for agricultural production under enhanced ICT, automation, and robotics technologies. His Research/Academic track-record includes positions such as: Director of the Institute for Bio-economy and Agri-technology (IBO | CERTH); Professor (Agri-Robotics) University of Lincoln, UK, and Senior Scientist (Operations Management), Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the founder of the agri-tech Private Company farmB Digital Agriculture. Maria Lampridi is a Mechanical Engineer focusing, through her MSc and PhD studies, on Environmental Management and Sustainability. Main research areas include life cycle assessment of agricultural production systems and sustainability assessment of advanced agri-technologies as parts of these systems. Currently she is a Research Assistant in the Institute of Bio-economy and Agri-technology (iBO) of the Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). George P. Petropoulos is Assistant Professor in Geoinformatics at the Dept. of Geography, Harokopio University of Athens. His main research interests include: geoinformation with emphasis on applications in physical geography/environment and/or human geography and/or spatial planning, the use of cutting-edge technologies (Earth Observation, GIS, GPS, web, digital cartography) in geographical applications and the presentation, processing, and analysis of geographical data. Yiannis Ampatzidis is Assistant Professor in precision agriculture and smart machines at the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering, University of Florida. He works in the area of mechanization and automation of specialty crop production. His current research focuses on mechanical harvesting of specialty crops, mechatronics, artificial intelligence, machine vision, precision agriculture, precision irrigation, smart machines, UAVs and machine systems. Panos Pardalos is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. He serves as Distinguished Professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Florida. Additionally, he is the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor of industrial and systems engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the computer and information science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the biomedical engineering program. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Optimization.

• Section I: Overview: Emerging Sensing Technologies for Precision Agriculture (Pardalos).- Soil reflectance spectroscopy for supporting Sustainable Development Goals (Angelopoulou).- Proximal sensing sensors for monitoring crop growth (Hallik).- Section II: Wireless network systems applications: Experimental performance evaluation techniques of LoRa radio modules and exploitation for agricultural use (Loukatos).- Evaluating the performance of a simulated softwarized agricultural wireless sensor network (M. Mostaco).- Smart agriculture: A low-cost wireless sensor network approach (Angelis).- Section III: Remote sensing applications: Potential of Sentinel-2 satellite and novel proximal sensor data fusion for agricultural applications (Pandžić).- Trends in satellite sensors and image time series processing methods for crop phenology monitoring (Verrelst).- Drone imagery in support of orchards trees vegetation assessment based on spectral indices and deep learning (Șandric).- Section IV: Proximal sensing applications: What does the NDVI really tell us about crops? Insight from proximal spectral field sensors (Atherton).- Geophysical sensors for mapping soil layers - a comparative case study using different electrical and electromagnetic sensors (Luck).- Geoinformation technologies in pest management: mapping olive fruit fly population in olive trees (Papafilippaki).- In-field experiments for performance evaluation of a new low-cost active multispectral crop sensor (Tagarakis).