About

I'm a PhD Student in Computer Science at the University of York and a recipient of a full studentship from the Doctoral Centre for Safe, Ethical and Secure computing. I am advised by Prof. Dan Franks and Prof. Katherine Denby.

I received my BSc. in Conservation Biology from Plymouth University and my MSc. in Quantitative Genetics and Genome Analysis from the University of Edinburgh. I have always loved the study of Ecology and I am thrilled to now be working on a project that uses tools from Computer Vision and Biology to benefit the lives of cocoa farmers and support agroforesty ecosystems.

Computer Vision and Cocoa Disease

The primary focus of my PhD. is the detection of disease in cocoa trees. As part of this work I secured a grant from the EPSRC Impact Accelerator Account and I've forged relationships and collaborations with Barry Callebaut, INIAP and Hacienda San José. Through these collaborations we hope to incorporate the models produced here into Integrated Pest Management strategies and make available a free smartphone app for the detection of cocoa disease

Modelling the dispersal of aquatic plants by float planes

In this project with the University of Alaska Anchorage, we aim to use computer vision and Bayesian modelling to understand how invasive and native aquatic plants are dispersed by float planes. This anthropogenic dispersal of plants is leading to the takeover of some Alaskan lakes by elodea and homogenisation of previously isolated ecosystems.

Publications

  • Computer vision for plant pathology: A review with examples from cocoa agriculture - In press

Models and Datasets

  • CocoaNet: Models for the early detection of disease in cocoa trees.
  • Plant - NotPlant: A semisupervised model for the detection of plants in images.
  • DisNet: A project aimed at developing pertrained weights of plant disease detection models. In progress