PhytoNodes for Environmental Monitoring won the best paper award

Sveuciliste u Zagrebu Fakultet Elektrotehnike i Racunarstva (FER), in English, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing has developed interesting events during 2022, where WatchPlant Project has been shown. For example, the Croatian Science Festival celebrated in May, an event aiming to bring science closer to the general public, especially children. The main theme of this year’s festival was celebrating and learning everything about life. Topics ranged from its definition to its preservation, from molecular biology, chemistry, and psychology to advanced technologies and beyond. FER used that opportunity to present WatchPlant’s mision, concept, and current technological advances.

Moreover, in November took place the Oper door day of FER University with Tim Lucas (University of Lüebeck). Every year FER has an open doors day to demonstrate all the things they are working on to current students and high-school pupils thinking about enrolling at FER. For this occasion, they prepared a little demo of the WatchPlant project and a poster with recent results that came out from its collaboration with University of Lüebeck, and they received a lot of interest.

In addition, FER celebrated LARICS Christmas robot party in December. It was a humanitarian event organized by LARICS members. The party was intended for everyone who wanted to dive into the world of programming and robotics by participating in fun and interactive workshops. It was the third time they organized something like this. The main attractions were robots who served cakes and hot drinks but they also took the opportunity to organize mini-workshops for their projects, including WatchPlant.

However, the most important action FER has developed in 2022 was the published two papers in collaboration with University of Lüebeck in September at GoodIT 22 conference with different authors: “Distributed Connectivity Control in Bio-Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks” and “PhytoNodes for Environmental Monitoring: Stimulus Classification base don Natural Plant Signals in an Interactive Energy-efficient Bio-hybrid System”, this second paper won the best paper award sponsored by MDPI “Sensors”, written by Eduard Buss, Tim-Lucas Rabbel, Viktor Horvat, Marko Krizmancic, Stjepan Bodgan, Mostafa Wahby and Heiko Hamann. It was presented by Eduard Buss and co-authored by LARICS members.