Mr. Ojasva Goyal, student of Department of Civil Engineering has bern awarded the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Young Research Fellowship 2024โ25 for the project titled: Deep Learning and UAV-Based System for Automated Wheat Rust Detection and Smart Agricultural Decision-Makingย fwhich he completed under the guidance of Prof. Srinivas Rallapalli. This fellowship, instituted by the TERRE Policy Centre, recognizes researchers across India working at the intersection of sustainability, innovation, and societal impact.
๐ Fellowship Info
Name: Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Young Research Fellowship 2024โ25
Organized by: TERRE Policy Centre
Date of Announcement: 23rd May 2025
Award Ceremony: 27th July 2025
Benefits: Fellowship certificate, seed funding support, national-level recognition | Fellowship awarded will be up to INR 25,000 (Rs. Twenty-five Thousand only), and the minimum fellowship amount will be INR 10,000 (Rs. Ten Thousand only).
Result Link: Click here
Process: Application -> Interview & Presentation
Project summary:
This project builds a UAV-powered, smart platform for early detection of wheat rust and actionable agronomic guidance, addressing one of Indiaโs major food security threats through scalable, field-ready innovation.
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HybridEff-Res Attention Network โ An attention-enabled, dual-backbone CNN model, achieving 98.8% accuracy and 0.98 F1-score in rust classification.
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Edge AI Deployment โ Real-time inference (<100 ms) on Jetson Nano/Xavier/Orin devices; enables offline, low-power operation in rural areas.
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Visual Q&A + RAG โ Farmers receive natural-language answers to questions like โWhat type of rust?โ or โWhat spray to use?โ, powered by VQA and retrieval-augmented generation.
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Federated Learning โ Local model updates without exporting raw images, preserving farmer data privacy.
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Scalability โ Field-tested system ready for real-world deployment with roadmap toward โmother-child droneโ architecture for automated spot-spraying.
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Validation & IP โ Published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio, IF 5.8); second paper under review in Computers & Electronics in Agriculture (Elsevier, IF 8.3); provisional patent filed through the BITS Pilani IPR cell
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐
๐ Exciting Joint Ph.D. Scholarship Opportunity! ๐
๐ BITS PILANI & RMIT UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA ๐