Crystal Crop wins 2nd place in Telespazio Technology Contest

It is a great honor for out team to have received a special mention (2nd place) in the "light" category of the Telespazio Technology contest, an open innovation contest of Telespazio (space and satellite infrastructure and services). The international jury contained representatives from Telespazio, Leonardo, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The context was organized in categories light and photon and received submissions from 32 different technological departments across Europe. 

Our team participated with a proposal for using earth observation services and satellite data to predict optimal harvesting times for better food security. We focused on some technical details to realize this approach from an Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering perspective. 

Together with the following PhD students and graduates we sent our proposal to the contest:

• Daniela De Medici, ARIESPACE spin off University of Naples Federico II
• Tom Furniss, University of Leicester, School of Health Sciences
• Jan Oliver Ringert (proposal lead), University of Leicester, School of Leicester
• Eliyas Woldegeorgis, University of Leicester, School of Mathematics

We had presented an extended version of our proposal to a Jury already a few months ago and everyone was now waiting for the winners to be announced in the virtual awards ceremony.

We are very happy about receiving a special mention and are looking forward to some support and networking with Telespazio and its space partners. From a previous hackathon (where we took 2nd place) we have a larger team driving forward the product and service development to hopefully see some prototypes soon.

Great Thanks belongs to Carmine and Arnaud from the Leicester Innovation Hub for their support of the project since the hackathon last year and to Prof. John Remedios (Earth Observation Science) for his insight into the domain and invaluable feedback on our proposal.