6 ABU Students Win N2m Prize For Designing AI-based Crop Disease Detector
Six students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria have won the second position in the FCMB Agrictech Hackathon 2024 competition with a prize money of two million Naira.
They won the prize for developing a crop disease detector designed to be deployed as an innovative solution in early detection of crops diseases peculiar to northern Nigeria.
The device called ‘CropDiseaseDetector’, was described as “an affordable and user-friendly AI-based system that works real-time but offline (only online for updates), which makes it suitable for use even in remote areas”.
It scans and detects various diseases affecting crops majorly grown in the northern part of Nigeria, as well as provides recommendations or remedial solutions to farmers.
The system can also be scaled up to adapt to different crops and regional variations in disease prevalence.
The award ceremony took place at the Primrose Tower, FCMB Head Office, Lagos on September 30, 2024, with Sufiyanu Ibrahim of the Department of Computer Engineering collecting the prize on behalf of the team and the University.
The six-member ‘AgroGuardians’ team includes Sufiyanu Ibrahim, Department of Computer Engineering; Hadiza Mohammed, Department of Computer Science; and Salim Babangida, Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, Lawal Uzairu of Department of Electrical Engineering, Abubakar Taufik, Faculty of Agriculture; and Abdulfattah Omisanya of Agricultural and Bio-resources Engineering Department.
The FCMB Agrictech Hackathon is focused on addressing inadequate funding for agricultural research and development, poor infrastructure for storage and transportation, limited access to credit for small-scale farmers, and limited adoption of technology in agriculture.
There were over 1, 400 submissions for the competition from registered businesses, teams of developers and individual developers from more than 20 countries.
