Kabarak University, Kenya student team iCropal qualify for Microsoft Imagine Cup EMEA Regional Final

Feb 18, 2019

iCropal

Each year Microsoft hosts its student Imagine Cup competition. A competition where student developers showcase their innovative solutions built on Microsoft’s technology. Starting with online finals, national and regional finals. Then on to the world finals with winner of the competition being awarded a grand prize package of about 100,000$.

This year’s EMEA online semifinal competition as usual received hundreds of submissions. With only 12 teams moving on to the next stage.
Only two teams, iCropal and Athena-IO from Kenya and Tunisia respectively qualified from Africa to present at the online finals. They will present their innovate ideas for a chance to win the first place price of 15,000 $. And qualification to the world finals championship.

Team iCropal is made up of 3 Kabarak University students. Emmanuel Okumu a Cyber Security and Forensic student, Ian Kamau and AbdhiHakim Hussein Computer Sceince students.



The teams solution looks to hep farmers know and understand the diseases attacking their crops or farm animals. Using Microsoft’s cognitive AI services and Augmented reality technology.

An overview of team iCropal’s project

Agriculture is the major sector that contribute to the economy of the country. Yet, many farmers are going under difficult conditions majorly on diseases affecting their farms. This causes huge loss to the farmers and organizations. The rate at which diseases affect is inversely proportional to the food production.

Augmented Reality brings farmers into a visual room where a farmer interacts with a holographic bot Cortana. As a virtual veterinarian assistant that brings possible infected cow hologram in front of the user (farmer). Explains about the disease, possible source and also predict the possible solution to the disease affecting the cattle based on the users’ enquiries in the augmented reality application.

Farmers can now have a reality experience of a dairy cattle diseases and how to go about in mitigation ways of finding the best solution to a certain disease.

Also, the crop farmers can use our app extension module to upload or capture image from the vegetables, crops or some fruit section affected with a certain disease and the app will perform analysis through computer vision to recognize the possible problems affecting them.

Not all about that, it will pull possible solutions and uses GPS tracker to send the reports to the data centre where from this point, it will use Machine learning process to show the possible spread of the diseases through the Bing maps visually or running models as data, drugs with high demand, highest infected areas, the fall or raise of market profits and also the organization or government strategies that can help them to enforce proper strategies suggested to help farmers in such situations.

Congratulations to team iCropal and we will bring you an update after the finals in March.