The NTU research team led by Professor Joe-Air Jiang has just successfully developed the epidemiological monitoring system on plants. What these NTU scientists have been doing over the past years was just reported and published recently, and the research result thus provide a great number of an actual censor data as well as the analysis of cloud-computing for a reference to both of the farmers and the government department of agriculture. These years, the epidemiological monitoring system has been integrated with the automated function, and the research result has just been promoted to a new generation that it is able to monitor the orchid green house. Both of the two research systems were just reported on March 29th by Katia Moskvitch, the reporter from BBC News. And Katia Moskivistch praised the NTU scientists by saying that this is what integrated with the advanced communication technology, which has successfully achieved the great innovation of having this agricultural revolution with the NTU research result. The government encourages farmers to use new technologies, and the efforts are paying off.

According to the BBC report, it says that Taiwan is located in the intersection of the tropical and the sub-tropical area, where it is the best environment to plant various kinds of fruits here because of the weather condition and the geographical environment. Taiwan is thus famous for its fruits and known for the kingdom of fruits in the world. However, fruit flies are a common pest in Taiwan since the weather and the environment here provide a place for fruit flies. The larvae of these tiny insects infest ripe fruits, making them unsellable, and thus it caused the damage in the island’s gross domestic products (GDP). Under this circumstance in Taiwan, the epidemiological monitoring system has thus been developed ever since 2006 led by Professor Joe-Air Jiang and Professor Fu-Ming Lu of NTU Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering along with the teamwork from Professor En-Cheng Yang of NTU Department of Entomology in association with Professor Chwan-Lu Tseng and Professor Yung Chung Wang of Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taipei University of Technology. The research team made it by having scientists from different universities with different professional backgrounds to develop the remote wireless monitoring system with the research fund they apply for from the National Science Council and the Council of Agriculture of Executive Yuan in Taiwan.

The NTU scientist team led by Prof. Joe-Air Jiang first applied their epidemiological monitoring system on the two targets, one is the Oriental Fruit Fly, also known as Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel), and the other is the night moth, Spodoptera litura (Fabricius), both are the treat to the major crops in Taiwan. By monitoring the two targets, the research team thus developed the long-distance wireless monitoring techniques. During the research project, the NTU scientists also made it with the development of the infrared monitoring equipment for the use of auto counting the number of the pest. It has been such a progress that the monitoring equipment was the system with the quantitative monitoring from the very beginning to the innovation with the integration of the wireless monitoring techniques and now the development of the Internet technique with the infrared monitoring system. With the full support from the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, and Kaohsiung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, the scientists, the research people and the farmers from all over the island participated in this research project on the ecological monitoring system on the Oriental Fruit Fly and the real-time monitoring system for plant quarantine pests. This epidemiological monitoring system has already been set up with 27 Internet connections all over Taiwan with the great feedback of the Taiwanese farmers. This monitoring system can measure the weather conditions and the number of the agricultural pests every 30 minutes. All the monitoring equipment that have already been set on the farmlands can be activated via the solar energy, and all the data detached from the measurement can be transported back to the server in Taipei via ZigBEE, GSM, GPRS and 3G. In order to get the relation between the number of the agricultural pests and the weather conditions, the members (Dr. Cheng-Long Chuang, Dr. Chia-Pang Chen and the doctoral candidate Tzu-Shiang Lin) in the NTU research team have successfully developed a pest alarm system with a great number of data from the research results by using the monitoring systems and the related resources and links. This pest alarm system can forecast the possible pest breakout in seven days to help farmers and the related governmental bureaus take actions to do the pest control in order to prevent the pest from doing any harm to the crops. So that the farmers can work on the fruit farms before the pest breaks out to diminish the growth of the agricultural pest and last but not the least, so that the farmers get to know when to use pesticide in the critical moment.

This research project of the epidemiological monitoring system is supported by the fund of the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center. We expect that this monitoring system will have the continual renovation so that it can be the great help to the automated greenhouses. In the near future, the mature development of the epidemiological monitoring system will definitely show its great business value by helping the orchid greenhouses in Taiwan out with more effective, energy-conserved and precise environment control so that the Taiwanese orchids which are traded to the United States will make a bigger profit and contribute more with the actual benefits to the agriculture in Taiwan.

Professor Joe-Air Jiang successfully led the NTU research team to work on the needs for the Taiwanese farmers according to the agricultural development in Taiwan. They made it possible by having the high-tech techniques applied on the agricultural pest monitoring and the effective energy control in automated greenhouses by successfully using the wireless monitoring techniques. This is definitely something new and outstanding around the world, which already has the attention from the international press with the news report. Please see the website link for the BBC News on the report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21929307

We look forward to more applications by using this revolutionary monitoring system on the professional fields of smart grid, smart city and monitoring air pollution so that the future generation can benefit from it with a better life.