Speaker bio:

Tony Pridmore is Professor and Associate Head of School at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham. With a background in computer vision, Tony’s research has centred since 2008 on the development and deployment of image-based plant phenomics technologies. His contributions include methods for plant feature extraction, image segmentation and 3D reconstruction from multiple views. Tony’s work on the recovery from X-ray CT imagery of 3D descriptions of plant roots growing in soil was central to the construction of Nottingham’s Hounsfield Facility. More recently he has been Director of the Technology Touching Life Network PhenomUK, and now serves as UK Scientific Representative to EMPHASIS.

Seminar synopsis:

UKRI recently announced a £2.4M Research Infrastructure Scoping Project – PhenomUK Research Infrastructure – which aims to produce a proposal and business plan for a national research infrastructure providing plant and crop phenotypng services to UK scientists. The infrastructure will be co-designed with the UK phenotyping community but is intended to be distributed, with regional sites, and provide sustainable access to and support for physical facilities, a digital infrastructure, and networking and training for all sectors of the phenomics community. The initiative is closely linked to the EU ESFRI project EMPHASIS, which aims to produce a pan-European phenotyping infrastructure. It is intended that PhenomUK will develop into a UK node of this larger organisation. This talk will describe the national and international background to the PhenomUK Research Infrastructure project, present is aims, structure and timelines, and discuss ways in which colleagues can become involved in this exciting community venture.

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