Discussing smart farming in Greece in the KATANA Roadshow Athens

OpenCircle, an equity crowdfunding platform developed by Parnasse S.A. – and a consortium member of the KATANA Horizon 2020 project, organized on February 2nd 2017 a meeting (KATANA Roadshow Athens) at the premises of Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) in Athens, Greece. The event aimed at informing Greek potential stakeholders about the possibilities of applying innovative ideas and the funding opportunities offered by the project.

NEUROPUBLIC was invited by the organizers of the event to talk about the status of Smart Farming in Greece, and present its smart farming project which is currently taking places in various locations all over Greece, in collaboration with GAIA EPICHEIREIN. I had the opportunity to represent NEUROPUBLIC in the event so I compiled a set of slides (reusing existing material and adding my own touch in order to make the slides appealing to the specific audience) that tried to cover as many aspects as possible in the time allocated for this presentation.

Γεωργία Ακριβείας στην Ελλάδα του σήμερα from Vassilis Protonotarios

Our contribution aimed at highlighting the specificities of the Greek agricultural sector that prevent typical smart farming approaches from being successfully applied in Greece as well as at encouraging participants to participate with related innovative ideas in the open call of the KATANA project.

What I found challenging was to collect sufficient information on the status of smart farming in Greece; despite the fact that there are numerous Greek SMEs providing the necessary hardware and services (though not as a package as NEUROPUBLIC does) and also numerous EU-funded projects that focused on applying smart farming approaches in various Greek cases of crops and locations, only scarce information was available. I found a couple of presentations, descriptions of a couple of related projects (but not their outcomes) and one really useful (and recent) report on precision agriculture in Greece (which provided useful information for some of the slides) co-authored by Prof. Fountas from the Agricultural University of Athens. I know that the Smart AKIS H2020 project will work on a marketplace for smart farming so I hope that all related information will be more easily discoverable and retrievable in the near future. :-)

The event was well organized (big thanks to the organizers - Parnasse S.A.), engaged a diverse audience (including academia, entrepreneurs, students etc.) and my presentation raised some interest among the participants, which was expressed in a high number of questions afterwards as well as after the end of the event. I also had the opportunity to make some really interesting connections meeting people working on smart farming from different perspectives.

ΚΑΤΑΝΑ is a project funded through the Horizon 2020 programme and aims to promote innovative and smart business ideas in the agrifood sector. Through a well-defined process which includes innovative tools such as peer to peer evaluation and Reward Crowd Funding, at the final step 10 innovative consortia will be selected and receive €100.000 each, in order to proceed with the implementation of their ideas.

Discussing about open data during MEDHackathon 2016

MEDHackathon 2016 took place in Patras, Greece, between 13-15/7/2016 - it was organized by various organizations including ERFC and SDI4Apps and hosted by the University of Patras in the lovely Conference Cultural Centre. MEDHackathon consisted of two main parts:

1. A Conference on the first day, followed by
2. A hackathon on the next two days - open data in different contexts and types. 

Both events were international, attracting participants from Greece, Latvia, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Norway etc.

Could you be such an #innovative #farmer? Texting cows, #fleets & #drones to #manage your #farm @vprot @Neuropublic pic.twitter.com/kPZg8QYtlB

— Irene Matzakou (@IreneMatz) July 13, 2016

I had the pleasure to attend the first two days of the event and in fact to make a presentation on how NEUROPUBLIC makes use of open data in its smart farming services. It has been a long time since I last participated in a Conference and a bit longer since I last made a presentation.The presentation provided some information on the status of open data in the agricultural sector, provided examples of open data in terms of types and formats and then showed examples of commercial uses of open data in commercial applications. The presentation concluded with the description of NEUROPUBLIC's GAIA Sense network consisting of a number of telemetric stations (GAIATrons) that are developed in-house and explained how the sensor data of these stations are combined with open earth observation data from the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide meaningful services to farmers.

Doing business with Open Data in agriculture by Vassilis Protonotarios

The Conference included presentations from the Greek public sector (describing the progress and status of opening up governmental data) as well as from private sector (focusing on how they make use of these data). It has been a great experience and allowed me to get to know some really interesting people like Nikolas Petropoulos from ERFC (organizers and hosts of the event), Visiting Prof. Fotis Nanopoulos (ex General Director of EUROSTAT and a person full of interesting stories to share), Irene Matzakou (Intrasoft International, really focused on projects and also active on social media like me!), Ery Zisi from the Greek Ministry of Agriculture (the person responsible for the ministry's open data!), Kalliope Aggelakopoulou (legal advisor and active contributor to the official Greek Open Data portal) and many-many more.



At the same time I had the pleasure to meet some old friends and colleagues like Karel Charvat (he was among the organizers of this event), Pavlos Georgiadis (We Deliver Taste / CAPSELLA), Prof. Vassilis Makios (Corallia) and others.

During the 2nd day of the event (which was also the first day of the Hackathon), I had to pass the floor to my colleague Thanasis Manos as I had to leave (and get back to the office) after I made a presentation of NEUROPUBLIC's challenge.

Lots of interesting ideas materialized using #OpenData in #MEDHackathon - congrats to everyone working on them! https://t.co/vHbQcjQRAO

— V. Protonotarios (@vprot) July 15, 2016

If you want to get an overview of what happened during MEDHackathon 2016, you can check out the Twitter hashtag #MEDHackathon for short comments and lots of photos from the event. The event was also broadcasted live through the University of Patras's Web TV.

Overall it was a nice experience, which combined the presentation of our work (the GAIASense network), setting up a challenge for the hackathon based on GAIATron sensor data and some useful networking among the participants.

Presenting the VOA3R platform in Greece

A partial view of the Workshop's audience
(photo by Maritina Stavrakaki) 

Today I was invited to make a short presentation about the VOA3R project at the "1st Scientific National Workshop about Traditional Varieties" organized at the Agricultural University of Athens, with the Lab of Viticulture being one of the organizers. There must have been more than 60 people in the room during the whole Workshop, mostly agricultural researchers from public institutes, individual agronomists and representatives from the Greek Ministry of Rural Development and Food.

vprot presenting VOA3R project
(photo by Maritina Stavrakaki) 

Even though my presentation was not initially planned, we managed to allocate 10 minutes in the already packed program of the workshop. My presentation consisted of only 10-11 slides, mostly focusing on the VOA3R platform and its usefulness for the specific audience. I also emphasized the option to have the GRNET team create digital repositories for any of the participating research institutes, which could be populated by the researchers and harvested at a later stage, in order to provide access to these research publications through the VOA3R platform. Despite the lack of time and my short presentation, there was some interest about the platform and the possibility of participation from the audience. I was really sorry that I didn't have more time to demonstrate the VOA3R platform real-time and instead I was limited to showing a couple of screenshots but I suppose that it was better than nothing. A video of my short presentation can be found below (it's in Greek - sorry!):

It would be great to see a community of Greek agricultural researchers in VOA3R platform, especially those working on the preservation of local/traditional plant species/varieties... it seems that there is a significant amount of scientific and research outcomes published in Greek national or even regional journals/magazines, with limited impact on the wider research and scholar community. I consider this to be a pity, since these outcomes could be really useful to researchers working in the same areas from all over the world. VOA3R platform could be the solution to providing the tool that could make these research outcomes available to the whole research community of this specific area...