As reported in the report recently issued by the United Nations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC Report 2021), the benefits that technology provides to a green and sustainable economy are highly appreciated and under intense research and development globally. Circuits and Systems (CAS), which are the base for any system, can bring the needed functionalities and performances for reaching eco-friendly, circular, and practical solutions.  The IoT active connections in agriculture (as an example in Europe) are exponentially increasing, proving that Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA or Precision/Smart Agriculture) is a very fast-growing research field, where more controlled quality production, water use optimization, and a lower spreading of pesticides and fertilizers are some key issues, serving the improvement of food quality, but also helping the respect of agriculture for the environment. For reaching these targets, electronics are the perfect tool for interfacing the data sources, extracting the data and processing them, and obtaining the needed information along the whole food chain: from the farmer, and the professional stakeholders to the consumers. 

In the Distinguished Lecture, an overview of electronics for CSA will be presented, analyzing the possible solutions that can bring important innovations, advancing the actual strategies based on remote or indirect measurements, instead of in-place measuring the plant and soil parameters (a.k.a. Let the Plants do The Talking), associated with more standard information derived from environmental conditions. This new and disruptive technology, related to Wearable Sensors for Plants, the World Economic Forum has recently identified as one of the “Top five technologies about to change the world”, indicating it is one of the key solutions to increase food production by 70% by 2050 to be able to feed the world population. Application scenarios for crop monitoring, water control, information communication, and decision support will be presented. In particular, it will analyze technologies for reaching the needed levels of low power and low cost and the efficient ones to be applied to AgriFood at the global scale, supporting food security and sustainability.

Biography:

Full Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications. His research interests range from Micro&Nano Electronics and Smart System Integration to IoTs for the AgriFood Value Chain and for BioMedical Devices. Visiting Professor at EPFL Lausanne and Tel Aviv University. Visiting Scientist (2018) at MIT and Harvard Medical School for the project Smart electronic IoT SysTEms for Rehabilitation Sciences.  Author and co-author of 5 patents and more than 350 scientific publications in international journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Leading the MiNES (Micro&Nano Electronic Systems - http://mines.polito.it) Laboratory of Politecnico di Torino and coordinating the Italian Institute of Technology Microelectronics group at Politecnico di Torino (IIT@DET).

Founder and Vice-Chair of the IEEE CAS Special Interest Group on AgriFood Electronics. Founder and Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on AgriFood Electronics. Founder and General-Co-Chair of the IEEE Conference on AgriFood Electronics.  Member of the IEEE Sensors Council and the BioCAS Technical Committee. Associate Editor of the IEEE Open Journal on Engineering in Medicine and Biology (OJ-EMB). General Chair of IEEE BioCAS Conference in 2017 in Torino.  Founder of the Master's Degree in AgriTech Engineering at Politecnico di Torino.

Tenures in "IoT for Agriculture ", "Introduction to MEMS & BioMEMS", "Design of MEMS" and “Design about Food: Digital Sensors and Instruments for Design” at Politecnico di Torino.