Call for Graduate Mentees for a Jira-funded Project at UMaT

Project Overview
Agriculture employs over one-third of the economically active global population and over 70% of the economically active population in Africa. In Ghana, which is the focus of this study, the extent of population growth and climate change-induced drought makes traditional rainfall-dependent farming no longer reliable. This has resulted in high regional unemployment threats, food insecurity and reduced crop quantity and quality, which require critical attention as recommended in United Nations’ SDGs 1 and 2. Currently, the most promising remedy is the smart Agricultural Internet-of-Things technology (Agri-IoT Tech), which can address these challenges via precision farming and greenhouses while increasing food production capacities and crop quality on less acreage.

Within this research arena, several benchmarking Agri-IoT solutions can be acquired, deployed in farms with the electricity grid and Wi-Fi/cellular coverages, and managed by farmers with sufficient financial resources and technical expertise in IoT, which is generally not the case in Africa. Fortunately, the Ph.D. research of Dr Effah proposed novel scientific foundations for building context-relevant Agri-IoT Solutions for Sub-Saharan Africa with custom-built sampling-based prototypes of this Agri-IoT technology (Agri-IoT Tech) for field deployments. However, his initial results could not validate all proposed theoretical frameworks (i.e., our inter-cluster multihop communication framework) and the realistic end-user performance expectations required to approve the commercial viability of this technology due to insufficient funds and time to build adequate sensor nodes and deploy them over a long period under different environmental conditions and seasons.

This project is motivated to address the aforementioned challenges by building human resource capacities (mentorship) in this field and using the imparted expertise to build adequate Agri-IoT Tech prototypes and outsource them to end-users (farmers) in order to validate the commercial viability of our solution in large-scale farm experimentations. Thus, the final project outcome will be a robust and affordable smart Agri-IoT Tech that can serve as the technological backbone for addressing food insecurity issues and the present unemployment threats due to climate change-induced season failures in Ghana and beyond by way of making farming lucrative and attractive to the youth.

Eligibility

• Applicant should be a registered post-graduate students of the University of Mines and Technology
• Should be an MSc/MPhil or PhD student of Computer Science and Engineering Department/Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department/Renewable Engineering Department.

If selected, applicants are to note that:

•  the project will fully fund the cost of the research.
• The project tenure is of 2 years