Taleus ITB Team Advances to the Asia Pacific Final of Microsoft, Imagine Cup 2018
BANDUNG, LK – After successfully entering the Indonesian finals in the Imagine Cup 2018 event on March 15, 2018 in Jakarta, the Taleus Team from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) successfully advanced to the next stage, namely the Asia Pacific Finals Imagine Cup 2018 which will be held on April 2-5, 2018 in Kuala Lumpur.
In the competition held by Microsoft, the Taleus Team created the Dr. Tania app, which helps farmers identify diseases and provide treatment solutions for pest-affected plants. Through the smartphone app, farmers simply send photos of diseased leaves or plants, which are then analyzed by the Dr. Tania app, identifying the disease, treatment solutions, available products, and even where to purchase the medicine.
"Farmers in Indonesia often have difficulty identifying what's wrong with their crops. Even if they do, they struggle to find treatment. This is crucial for them, as it can lead to greater impacts such as crop failure and other issues. With the Dr. Tania app, we strive to help identify and provide solutions using our technology and knowledge," explained Febi Ifdillah, a member of the Taleus Team.
Febi admitted that creating an app is actually easy, but creating one that's useful to the wider community and has business value is quite difficult. Her team explores ideas, technology, innovation, and business development. Community-based, the team continually strengthens the farming community by adding new features to further assist farmers.
The team, consisting of Febi Ifdillah, Ahmad Ghifari, and Harry Kefas, is currently preparing application innovations for the upcoming Asia Pacific Final. Several new developments will be showcased at the final, such as the addition of a feedback mechanism. This feature is intended to allow any farmer who sends an image of a diseased plant to immediately add to the application's database. The larger the application's database, the better. Furthermore, the team is developing an annotation platform for more accurate identification.
"We hope that the more data the Dr. Tania app has, the more it can help farmers. We want the app to focus on specific commodities that are commonly used in Indonesia," he said.
Meanwhile, the team's supervisor, Ayu Purwarianti, explained that the application development project was a collaboration between several disciplines. She explained that in computer science, the techniques used were artificial intelligence, specifically deep learning for image recognition.
"This is a collaboration between students from different academic backgrounds," said the STEI lecturer.
STEI via Kemahasiswaan ITB