Physics professor Christopher Bidinosti has been at the University of Winnipeg since 2007, and much of his recent work sits at the intersection of computing and agriculture. As a co-founder of the TerraByte research group, Bidinosti is helping advance digital agriculture in Manitoba by supporting plant science research with new data and imaging tools.

Where did you work before?

I’ve been in universities most of my life. Before coming to the University of Winnipeg, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University and prior to that at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Before that, I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia and an undergraduate student at Brandon University. I also worked at Ayerst Organics in Brandon, MB, where they extracted estrogen from the pregnant mare’s urine and made hormone replacement drugs.

What got you interested in this area of work?

I’ve always had an interest in plants, gardens and growing food. Even though I don’t do it, I still find it fascinating. So, when my colleague and I were working on advanced computing techniques about 10 years ago, I saw this as an opportunity to engage my interest in agriculture. With the shrinking cost and size of sensors, like cameras in our phones, and the massive increase in computing power, it felt like the right time to jump into this kind of research.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at the University.

Our research group, TerraByte, works on several aspects of digital agriculture, including data generation, data hosting and sharing, and machine learning models for things like plant classification and disease detection. We primarily work with plant scientists, helping them automate and expedite visual tasks like phenotyping and disease assessment. We like to think of what we do as research helping research.

Michael Beck, Christopher Henry and I have been pushing digital agriculture for a long time. When Manitoba Crop Alliance (MCA) put out its “hope and dreams” call last fall, we knew we had to pitch the idea for the Manitoba Centre for Digital Ag (MCDA). When you look at other jurisdictions, there is significant investment in digital agriculture, and we felt strongly that Manitoba needed a more co-ordinated approach. The MCDA isn’t about a single building or institution. It’s about bringing researchers, grower organizations, government, and industry together around a shared provincial strategy. Our focus is on mobilizing researchers across universities and colleges to work collaboratively, apply for funding together and make better use of the digital tools we already have. That’s the vision we’re working toward, and we really appreciate MCA’s support in helping move it forward.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

It’s huge and we appreciate it very much. It’s very forward thinking. There is no doubt that computers will bring as much change to agriculture as engineering, chemistry or genetics have in the past.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

It really goes back to work we do with plant scientists and researchers. If we can help them expedite their breeding programs, then heartier crop varieties that are more pest, disease or heat resistance, for example, can make it to farms much sooner. That’s where we see a real, long-term benefit for farmers.

One example of this is work we do in the lab using low-cost cameras to take images of plants from many different angles and build 3D computer models of them. From those models, we can automatically extract plant traits like height, width, volume and leaf angle, without disrupting the plant’s growth cycle or relying on visual scoring. A lot of plant science still depends on people visually ranking plants, which takes a huge amount of time and can be quite subjective. What we’re doing replaces hours or days of manual work with something that takes minutes and produces consistent results.

For plant breeders, that’s a big deal. It means they can evaluate more plants, more accurately and much faster than before. That speeds up research and helps identify promising varieties earlier in the process. While this work isn’t showing up directly on farms next year, it influences the varieties that farmers will eventually be growing.

We’re very thankful for the trust farmers have placed in us. We’re always happy to talk about what we’re working on and to hear about other projects we could be involved in. This kind of work is an investment in the future, and we take that responsibility seriously.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

Biking, running and reading.

What is the best part about your job?

The best part of my job is working in an area that I find genuinely fascinating and working with inspired students. Over the last several years, my focus has shifted more toward digital agriculture, which brings together engineering, imaging equipment and computation. We often talk about how engineering plus agriculture gave us tractors, chemistry plus agriculture gave us pesticides, genetics plus agriculture gave us breeding, and now it’s computers plus agriculture. No one knows exactly where it will land, but there’s no doubt it’s going to be big, and that’s what makes it so interesting to work on.

What gets you most excited about your work?

The people I work with. I have amazing colleagues and collaborators who are incredibly talented and fun to work with, and I’ve worked closely with some of them for many years. The work itself is also fascinating because of how complicated it is. Plants and real farm fields are insanely complicated systems, even more so than physics, and that challenge is what keeps the work exciting.

Learn more at terrabyte.acs.uwinnipeg.ca

Michael Beck is an assistant professor for data analytics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Winnipeg (UWinnipeg). Before moving to Canada in 2017, Beck earned his master’s degree in mathematics and doctorate in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. He has held postdoctoral positions at both UWinnipeg and the University of Manitoba (UM) and lives in Winnipeg.

What is the best part about your job?

The best part about my job is that I get to work in a very interdisciplinary field, where people from many different departments come together. I work with physicists, plant scientists and other computer scientists; it’s a very wide spectrum of people. I might talk to a farmer one day and a scientist the next, then sit down to write some code or head into the lab and start building a robot. It’s so diverse. That variety is what makes the work exciting and what makes me happy week by week.

What got you interested in working in computer science?

It was after doing my postdoc at UM when Christopher Henry and Christopher Bidinosti (both professors at UWinnipeg) asked if I could work on a project. They wanted me to build a robot, create a database to hold images and do a number of things I had never done before. When they asked if I could do it, I said I hadn’t done anything like it before, but I was willing to learn, and that was all they wanted.

My journey went from a very theoretical background in mathematics toward real-world problems. Curiosity and not being afraid to try something I wasn’t trained for is what got me into computer science, and the interdisciplinary nature of the work is what made me stay.

Tell us a bit about your role and the Manitoba Centre for Digital Ag.

As an assistant professor, my role is teaching and research, and I work in digital agriculture with TerraByte. We focus on bringing new technologies into agriculture, from machine learning and equipment such as sensors to new data acquisition methods and figuring out how that data can be useful. This can mean helping plant breeders, agronomy research or even directly on the farm. We have people from physics and computer science working with plant scientists, and together we solve research problems. We don’t know everything about plants, and plant scientists don’t have a full picture of what technologies are available, so bringing those worlds together is where real progress happens.

The Manitoba Centre for Digital Agriculture (MCDA) grew out of this same thinking. When Manitoba Crop Alliance (MCA) put out a “hopes and dreams” call, we responded with the idea of bringing together the many people already working in digital agriculture across Manitoba. Right now, there are individual efforts, but no co-ordinated, province-wide strategy. The MCDA is intended to connect post-secondary institutions, grower associations such as MCA and MPSG, government, industry and farmers, so that work can happen more strategically.

Similar centres exist in the U.S., the UK, Australia and even in Saskatoon, and the level of investment and synergy in those institutions far exceeds what we currently see in Manitoba. Without something like this, my concern is that Manitoba risks being left behind, with new technologies developed elsewhere and brought in at a cost. We want innovation to happen here, not only for economic reasons, but because solutions developed locally are better suited to our conditions. The MCDA isn’t a brick-and-mortar building. It’s more of a consortium that brings people together, avoids duplicated efforts and helps navigate an increasingly complex digital agriculture landscape. No single group can do this alone, and that’s really what the MCDA is about.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

It’s absolutely instrumental. What we’re trying to build with the MCDA is very ambitious, and it’s hard to find funding channels for something like this. So, when MCA came to us and said, “Tell us about your hopes and dreams,” and then followed through with funding, that was absolutely massive. It’s an opportunity we would have a very hard time finding anywhere else, and we’re incredibly grateful. We really appreciate MCA and its members trusting us with this responsibility.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

This is still research, and the work we’re doing isn’t going to show up on farms next year. To some level, this is fundamental research. There was a time when chemistry had no business in agriculture, then someone invented fertilizer. There was a time when biology or genetics had no business in agriculture, but look at plant breeding now. I think digital agriculture is a similar story. We don’t yet know exactly what it will look like in 10 or 20 years, but farmer funding will help us shape that future here in Manitoba, together with the people who are living and working in this system.

There are some very tangible benefits already. One example is our work with plant breeders studying Fusarium head blight in wheat. We’re helping researchers assess diseased wheat heads more accurately and faster, which in turn accelerates breeding program and helps deliver more resistant varieties sooner. These are the kinds of projects we want to establish more of through the MCDA. We’re very thankful for the opportunity farmers have given us, and we take that responsibility seriously.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

I play a lot of different games, including board games, tabletop RPGs, computer and card games. I also enjoy sports like volleyball and soccer.

Who or what inspires you?

What I find regularly inspiring is seeing people who are really good at what they do, no matter what their field is. Watching people perform at a high level and master their craft is something I find motivating, and that inspiration can come from anywhere.

Do you have a favourite TV series, movie or podcast at the moment?

One series I really like is The Bear. I also enjoyed Arcane League of Legends, which is based on a computer game but stands on its own as an animated series. Recently, we’ve also been enjoying Pluribus.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.