the last few years have seen an increasing technological transfer from robotics to agriculture to develop intelligent vehicles that can significantly enhance the sustainability of agricultural systems.
Robotics technology has been recently proven to be especially valuable for the development of in-field high-throughput phenotyping platforms supporting precision farming applications, to improve natural resource-saving and health and safety conditions of the workforce, as well as to increase productivity and competitiveness of agricultural production.
In this respect, accurate and robust sensing and perception systems, taking advantage of the latest research advances in the field of machine learning and deep learning techniques, play a critical role in addressing unsolved issues such as safe interaction with workers and animals, controlled traffic applications, crop row guidance, surveying for variable rate applications, and situation awareness in general.
This Special Issue of Agronomy (impact factor = 2.259) invites original submissions addressing the study and development of sensing and perception systems to endow an agricultural vehicle with cognitive abilities to safely navigate and interact with its operational environment, with workers or other robots, as well as articles dealing with the study and development of novel data analysis techniques for crop assessment, recognition of condition using data acquired by agricultural robotic platforms, and any other relevant application of such technologies in crops and animal husbandry.
Papers providing experimental evidence in the field and involving the integration of different disciplines such as engineering, mathematics/statistics, occupational safety and health, human-machine interface and ergonomics, and environmental and computer science are particularly encouraged.
Contributions focusing on the development of agricultural robotic technologies to achieve the United Nations sustainable development goals, such as securing healthy and sustainable food and safe working conditions, and overcoming and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic are welcome.
Keywords:
- Sensor and robot networks in agriculture
- Multisensor and data fusion
- Machine learning and deep learning from sensor data in agriculture
- Environment mapping and classification
- Robot localization and navigation
- In-field phenotyping sensors and vehicles
- Safe human-robot interaction in agricultural applications
- Sensors and vehicles for in-field pest detection and management
- Harvesting automation
- Cooperative agricultural robotics
- Safety and health in agriculture
- Food security
Deadline for manuscript submissions: January 1, 2021.
For submission details, please visit:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/agronomy/special_issues/Agricultural_Robotic_Vehicles
Guest Editors
Dr. Eugenio Cavallo
Dr. Roberto Marani
Dr. Annalisa Milella
Springer proceedings and Special Issue in JIFS, IoS Press – Sixth International Symposium on Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (ISTA’20)
June 18th, 2020 
Daniela Lopez de Luise October 14-17, 2020, Chennai, India
http://www.acn-conference.org/2020/ista2020/
Submission Deadline: July 15, 2020
Submission Link: https://edas.info/N27446
AI Summer School (fully virtual) – August 3-7
June 18th, 2020 Daniela Lopez de Luise AI Summer School 2020 – AI for the “New Normal”
3-7 August 2020 (online sessions)
https://aisummerschool.aisingapore.org/
Organized by: AI Singapore
AI Singapore is pleased to bring back the AI Summer School in a fully virtual setting this August. This year's event will again bring together leading experts in the field to educate and foster collaboration among the next generation of researchers. The program will include Lectures, Tutorials, Hands-on Workshops, Panels, Poster Sessions, Best Practices Discussions, Industry Talks, Small-Group Mentoring Sessions and more…
University Students, Academic Researchers and Industry Practitioners are welcome to apply.
Application deadline: 5 July 2020
For more details, please visit https://aisummerschool.aisingapore.org/
Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition (SSBC 2020) – Call for Participants
June 18th, 2020 Daniela Lopez de Luise Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition (SSBC 2020)
Held in conjunction with IEEE/IAPR IJCB 2020
https://ieee-biometrics.org/ijcb2020/Program.html#acom
Important dates: Registration is already open
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ssbc2020/home
********************************************************
We invite research groups working on ocular biometrics, segmentation
problems
or other related vision tasks to take part in the 2020 Sclera
Segmentation Benchmarking
Competition (SSBC 2020).
Sclera biometrics have gained significant popularity among emerging
ocular traits in the last
few years. In order to establish the sclera as a viable biometric trait
and to evaluate its
potential for automated biometric systems, several works have been
presented in the literature,
using the sclera vasculature as a standalone biometric trait and in
combination with the iris.
Despite these initiatives, sclera biometrics need to be studied more
extensively to ascertain
their usefulness. Among the numerous challenges still open in this area,
efficient and robust sclera segmentation is among
the most important ones, affecting all downstream tasks, ranging from
normalization to recognition. While
a considerable amount of research has been directed towards sclera
segmentation in recent years,
the performance of existing techniques especially in cross-sensor
scenarios and across different
acquisition conditions is still not well explored. To investigate these
issues, to document
recent developments and to attract (and raise) the interest of
researchers in this emerging
biometric trait, we are organzing SSBC 2020 – a competition (and group
benchmarking effort) held
in conjunction with IJCB 2020 focusing on the problem of sclera
segmentation.
The competition builds on past sclera segmentation competitions, namely
SSBC 2015, SSRBC 2016, SSERBC 2017, SSBC 2018 and SSBC 2019 held in
conjunction with BTAS 2015,
ICB 2016, IJCB 2017, ICB 2018 and ICB 2019 respectively. SSBC 2020 is
the next in the series of
sclera segmentation challenges and aims to benchmark sclera segmentation
models in both cross
sensor settings as well as across different acquisition conditions.
The competition is open to everyone. Registartion is already open.
For details see: https://sites.google.com/view/ssbc2020/home
*** IMPORTANT ***
All participating researchers (achieving competitive performance) will
be invited as co-authors for
a summary paper of SSBC 2020 that will send for consideration at IJCB 2020.
*** ORGANIZERS ***
Dr. Abhijit Das, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Prof. Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Prof. Peter Peer, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenija
Assoc. Prof. Vitomir Štruc , University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenija
Matej Vitek , PhD candidate, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenija
Call for submissions for the special issue on “Reaching and Grasping the Multisensory Side of Dexterous Manipulation”
June 18th, 2020 Daniela Lopez de Luise 
Flyer.pdf