Hey!

So, I haven’t written here for, like, a year. That’s mostly my fault. I was busy, you know, graduating. And even though that’s done, to be honest, I still have plenty of other things to do, so I probably would have let this blog die. Except that, the other day, Dr. Li called me over and asked why our website hadn’t been updated for months. He showed me the very up-to-date websites of our collaborators, in order to shame me. So, for the one person who reads this blog (hi Dave), surprise! Today is your lucky day.

Or maybe tomorrow. It depends on when I finish this post.

So, without further ado, let’s get on with the news.

Graduation

Two members of our lab, me and Lizhi Jiang, graduated last December. Lizhi immediately scored a professorship back in China, and left at the end of last year. I’m staying at BSAIL to do a postdoc, which means that you have to put up with me for quite a while longer. What fun! See below for obligatory photos.

Congratulations to Lizhi, and, of course, thank you, Dr. Li, for getting us this far. It’s been a journey. A long journey…

Awards

I attended ASABE AIM last year in Toronto. It was pretty fun, aside from, you know, missing my flight and having to spend an unplanned night in Chicago. And then, upon arriving in Toronto, learning that Canada apparently hates my Discover card. But hey, it wouldn’t be AIM without some travel mishaps.

Despite arriving a day late, I was still able to present my poster, thanks to a very understanding session organizer. Then, I went home and forgot about it, until I received an email in September saying that I had won an award. No, I don’t know why it took so long. But hey, I’m not going to complain about free money.

Check out my poster and conference paper if you’re interested!

Also, if you like reading about AIM (for some reason), check out my post about AIM 2024. I also won an award that year. Good times.

Publications

We have a couple of new publications from the end of the year, from Chenjiao and Zhengkun:

• Plot-scale peanut yield estimation using a phenotyping robot and transformer-based image analysis
• Dense cotton boll counting with transformer-based video tracking and a customized phenotyping robot for data collection

Please check out our publications page to see all of our publications!

Personnel Changes

Last but not least, I just wanted to highlight some people coming and going, as they are wont to do. As I mentioned before, Lizhi Jiang has graduated and left the lab to pursue an academic career. Swee-fong Wang is a new student who joins us from UGA, focusing on robotics and computer vision. We also have two new undergraduate students, Scott MacGregor (helping out with 3D reconstruction and data annotation), and Justin Schverak (working on aerial hyperspectral sensing). Welcome new members!

Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more regularly here from now on. See you later, Dave!