From Our Correspondent
Six students of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria won the second position in the FCMB Agrictech Hackathon 2024 competition, coasting home with N2 million prize money.
TheNewsZenith reports that the students won the prize for developing a crop disease detector. This is to assist farmers in the early detection of diseases.
The Public Affairs Directorate, Office of the Vice-Chancellor, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria said in a statement that the device is called ‘Crop Disease Detector’.
“It is an affordable and user-friendly AI-based system that works in real-time but offline (only online for updates).
“This makes it suitable for use even in remote areas.
“The detector scans and detects various diseases affecting crops majorly grown in the northern part of Nigeria.
“It also provides remedial solutions to farmers over the identified diseases,” ThenewsZenith quotes the institutions stating.
It can also scale-up, adapting to different crops and regional variations in disease prevalence, the statement further read in part.
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The award took place at the FCMB Head Office in Lagos on Monday.
Sufiyanu Ibrahim of the Department of Computer Engineering collected the prize on behalf of the team and the University.
The six-member team, tagged ‘AgroGuardians’, is made up of the following students comprised of Sufiyanu Ibrahim, Hadiza Mohammed, Department of Computer Science and Salim Babangida, Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.
Others are Lawal Uzairu, Department of Electrical Engineering; Abubakar Taufik, Faculty of Agriculture and Abdulfattah Omisanya, Department of Agricultural and Bio-resources Engineering.
ThenewsZenith reports that FCMB Agrictech Hackathon focuses on addressing inadequate funding for agricultural research and development.
It is also addressing inadequate infrastructure for storage and transportation, limited access to credit for small-scale farmers and limited adoption of technology in agriculture.
FCMB received over 1,400 submissions from teams of developers and individual developers from more than 20 countries for the competition.
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