#ENRIITCyourCoffee S4 E8 on EMPHASIS and plant phenotyping for innovation

Welcome to the recap of #ENRIITCyourCoffee season 4 episode 8. Today we are venturing somewhat away from particle accelerators and synchrotrons instead into the flora. This episode was hosted by a familiar ENRIITCer Nikolaj Zangenberg from the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) and we had the pleasure to hear from Sven Fahrner, Manager & Business Planner at EMPHASIS, and Tony Pridmore, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham and Director of the UK Plant Phenotyping Network, PhenomUK.

Sven Fahrner started by summarising EMPHASIS with two terms: food security and climate change. EMPHASIS is approaching these huge topics from the focal point of plant phenotyping. What is phenotyping, you might ask? It is the dynamic interaction between the genetic code of the plant and the environmental impact on the plant.

A handy summarising image from the presentation can be found below. Download the full presentation here.

Sven points out that EMPHASIS has a wide range of both facilities and stakeholders with benefactors, given that they dig deep into plant performance, biomass production and overall influencing sustainable production. Sven will be discussing more the Data Industry group since that is the group that is most involved in the EMPHASIS Innovation Pilot.

Regarding facilities, EMPHASIS covers multiple climate zones and levels of facilities.

See the map in the video at 04:33. If you want to participate in EMPHASIS then please see their website here.

After a great intro to EMPHASIS, it was time for Tony Pridmore to elaborate on the Innovation Pilots. He elaborated that they see EMPHASIS as a technology broker between infrastructure operators and the technology developers and suppliers. The goal is to bring the right people together and foster an innovative environment.

The first steps have been to engage the key people to gather a community and then select a more active member to form an innovation board. This is the moment where Tony would like to use the collective knowledge from our audience and help them on the abstract task of community building.

Further Tony explained the next steps of providing innovation services to industry and academic developers. Some are more confident and some are expressed by their users. See the key topics explained by Tony in the video at 14:51.

Lastly, the EMPHASIS team is asking for help on engaging developers and our audience chipped in. View the video from 20:28.

 

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