23.04.2019

AI for plants : Microsoft presents “Make Your Wish” award winner!

The winner of the “Make Your Wish” award from the Microsoft AI Festival in Berlin has been chosen from more than 100 submitted wishes. The project of the Cologne IT consultancy sepago analyses plant growth and gives recommendations on how to achieve optimal yields. Find out more!

What is the Make Your Wish Award?

With “Make Your Wish”, Microsoft has called on people all over Germany to formulate wishes and ideas that can improve life with AI. More than 100 wishes have been received since it was launched at the end of 2018. At the same time, software developers and AI experts were sought to realize the submitted wishes. 42 “wish fulfillers” have registered with #MakeYourWish, 12 of the submitted wishes are currently being translated into concrete projects.


“When it comes to artificial intelligence, many people first think of risks and challenges. By focusing on people’s wishes, we want to make it clear that AI is a tool with which we can shape our future positively. The impressive variety of proposals that were submitted and the very practical wishes show how much potential we have for AI development in Germany,” says Sabine Bendiek, CEO of Microsoft Germany.


AI for plants

The jury of the MakeYourWish Award was convinced by this idea for a smart application of artificial intelligence (AI). Simone Kaiser (deputy director Fraunhofer CeRRI), Aya Jaff (co-founder of CoDesign Factory) and Andre Kiehne (head of Cloud and solutions business at Microsoft Germany) as well as the festival participants on site voted sepago’s project the winner in the public voting.

“We want to help people provide for themselves.”

“We no longer wanted to be a part of the problem, but a part of the solution,” says Tilmann Sies of sepago, the Cologne-based IT consultancy. The Microsoft partner takes care of the implementation of the idea. The goal: to avoid crop failures through AI-supported information to protect food plants from damage. Users – from farmers and small farmers to self-producers – can photograph their plants with a smartphone, AI analyzes the images. The application recognizes which pests can be seen on it, evaluates the colour of the plant and derives recommendations as to which nutrients should be fertilized, how irrigation should be optimized or what can be done against the found pests. The solution is based on the cloud platform Microsoft Azure and is to be promoted with further partners in the future.

Great prizes for the first three places

The winning concept from sepago will receive 25,000 euros for the further development of the project and technical support from AI experts from Microsoft. Second place (15,000 euros) goes to Microsoft partner PlanB and the development of an AI that monitors the condition of patients in order to alert doctors to early warning signs for strokes. The jury awarded third place (10,000 euros) to Team Neusta and the concept of an AI for the intelligent maintenance of power grids.

Source picture: pexels/ Daniel Frese

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