DigiFoods@ The Sensor Decade
The conference “The Sensor Decade” was organized by SINTEF, the University of Oslo, NGI, the business cluster Electronic Coast and the incubator StartupLab. It was an Oslo Science City event.
The conference was held on 1-2 June 2022 at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo (UiO) and the Oslo Science Park with 3 parallel sessions and 34 speakers. The main sponsors were, Kongsberg Maritime, Tomra ASA, the Norwegian Research Council and Oslo Kommune.
Technology providers are critical for the success of digitalisation in all industries, including the food industry. Marion O’Farrell (SINTEF) leads pillar 1 in the SFI DigiFoods, Novel Sensors and Application Development. As part of SINTEF’s in-kind contribution to DigiFoods in 2022, she led the organization of a conference for companies that develop and deliver sensors and sensor solutions in Norway. We believed that sensor companies lacked a common meeting and networking arena since they often partake in meetings and conferences focused on their respect verticals, e.g. food, agriculture, space, process industries, maritime, waste sorting. The goal with the conference was to provide this meeting place and build strong ties across those verticals and encourage them to find overlap in their technology development.
In addition to technical talks and stands, we also had The Student Challenge to involve students and get them to think innovatively. The prize was a full year membership at StartUpLab.
The students in The Student Challenge. Abhishesh Pal from AgriLives in on the left. Photo: Kilian Munch
There were over 50 participating companies, from small start-up companies to large corporations. We had 6 teams competing for the student prize, and the student association “Portal Space” presented its self-built rocket with built-in sensors.
DigiFoods @ The Sensor Decade:
- Jens Petter, from Nofima, presented “Design of spectroscopic smart sensors for quality assessment of heterogeneous foods.”
- Anders Hansen, from SINTEF, presented “Novel Sensors for Quality Classification of Strawberries in the Field”
- NEO HySpex showcased their technology at a stand in the exhibition area.
- The Student Challenge – Agrilives from NMBU submitted their entry based on computer vision and machine learning to help agri-robots to understand and interact safely with their surroundings.
- SINTEF employed a summer student, Arne Fredrik Adamsrød, after the conference to work on a platform for high speed integration of spectral sensor solutions.
Director of SFI DigiFoods Jens Petter Wold (left) presenting the center and Anders Hansen (right) presenting his work. Photo: Kilian Munch