Advancing Agri-Tech in Ireland

Advancing Agri-Tech in Ireland

TSSG are delighted to invite you to Advancing Agri-Tech in Ireland: Celebrating International Success in the South East Region.

Monday, May 20th 8.30am – 2pm

Lyrath Estate, Kilkenny

Special Address by EU Commissioner Phil Hogan

Waterford Institute of Technology’s, Telecommunications Software and Systems Group are linking up EU Commissioner Phil Hogan, and other major actors in the Agri-Tech space to celebrate the successes of Agri-Tech projects in the South East Region.

This event follows on from a series of events held over the latter number of years, bringing government officials, academic, policy makers, industry partners, start-ups and farmers together under one roof to generate sector wide interest in aligning our national strategy to real and appropriate ICT solutions for the agri-industry as a whole.

As part of the overall event, TSSG will host round table discussions in order to bring together interested parties from both ICT and the Agricultural sectors and develop common opportunities that can be identified and captured in order to feedback into the overall Smart Agri Hubs projects cascade funding structure.

Early registration for this event is essential, as spaces are very limited.

Agenda (subject to change)

Time

Name and Title

Organisation

8.30am

Tea/Coffee & Registration

9.00am

Dr. Aisling O'Neill

Manager of ArcLabs

9.15am

Dr. Sasitharan Balasubramaniam

Director of Research / PI VistaMilk

9.30am

Ms. Hazel Williams

Cluster Lead for Smart Agri Hubs (PACE)

9.45am

Mr. Kevin Doolin

Director of Innovation, TSSG / DEMETER, NIVA, AgROBOFood, MELD.

10.00am

Patrick Barrett

DAFM

10.15am

Donagh Berry

Teagasc

10.30am

Clare Hughes

CF Pharma

10.45am

Tea/Coffee/Networking

11.00am

Arrival of EU Commissioner Phil Hogan

11.20am

Sean Molloy / Rob O'Keefe (TBC)

Glanbia (PACE)

11.30am

Willie Donnelly

President of WIT

11.40am

EU Commissioner Phil Hogan Address

12.00noon

Round Table Discussions

Discussions will line up our National Strategy with Cascade funding from SAH.

1.00pm

Networking lunch

2.00pm

Close

About TSSG

TSSG is growing its reputation as the experts in applying ICT in the vital agricultural industry. It has multiple ICT/Agri initiatives underway, including large scale R&D grants in the areas of Internet of things technologies for Dairy Farming (PrecisionDairy) and milk production forecasting with some of Ireland’s largest dairy processors (Glanbia and Dairygold).

A recently won project was the SFI Research Centre called VistaMilk, a €40m National Research Centre for Agri-Tech funded by both SFI and The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. This project sees TSSG partner with TEAGASC (national agricultural research and advisory service), Tyndall (Research in sensor manufacturing) and Insight (data analytics research centre).

The goal of the SFI Research Centre, VistaMilk is to investigate and build technologies to advance precision agriculture in the dairy sector. In particular, they focus on improving the condition and efficiencies in the areas of pasture management, animal health and wellbeing, and food production.

PhD research underway include work on sensor networks for FOG computing/agri - compressed learning of smart datasets in smart agri - lameness detection with on-cow sensor networks. TSSG is also a partner in the SFI Research Centre, CONNECT and hosts their IoT Testbed, Pervasive Nation (https://connectcentre.ie/pervasive-nation/), with an internal infrastructure team available to build testbeds for any possible Agri project. TSSG is located on a site of 175 acres, with pasture land, access to water ways, forestry and other natural habitats adding to the richness of work that can be done by both applied and basic researchers.

TSSG is also the Irish/UK Lead for a €20 million Pan-European Agri-Food Project, which hopes to connect the dots to unleash the innovation potential for digital transformation of the European Agri-Food Sector. This project will see a further 6 million euros secured in research funding over the next 4 years, as well as an economic impact across Europe of over €30 million.