Science excellence – balancing innovation and practicality for real-world impact in cotton: Manish’s role is at the heart of the breeding program’s efforts to leverage recent advances in AI to enhance their capabilities. To achieve this, Manish has demonstrated from the start of his journey in the cotton industry that success meant federating a range of disciplines to achieve innovative goals. To this end, he has demonstrated an outstanding ability to collaborate with various experts in crop breeding, disease biology, computer vision, mechatronics, and technical staff on-farm. This enabled him to evaluate different sensors and technologies, including drones and ground robots, to collect relevant field data across seasons, and build AI models that can detect stems in the field, classify them into healthy and diseased stems, and quantify the disease level of each stem. This goes beyond what humans have ever been able to do and is of significant value to the breeding program as it will enable better selection of resistant lines.

However, what sets Manish apart from most AI researchers is his commitment to creating solutions that are not only accurate but also, and most importantly, practical and deployable in a commercial breeding program. A good example of that is that, alongside developing his AI models, he has been on a quest for the most scalable solution to collect images of cut stems. Understanding that for his models to be applicable, they needed to integrate seamlessly into breeding operations. He has therefore been trying to remove as many slow and labour-intensive steps to collect data directly on the tractor that cuts stems. Given the speed of the tractor and the amount of vibrations it creates, collecting good quality data at the source was a significant technical challenge, which Manish has been able to address this season. This paves the way for the deployment of his disease quantification tool in the commercial program.

Overall, Manish’s achievements are a testament to his ability to combine creativity and innovation with practicality, excellent communication skills, and kind and positive attitude, enabling him to work effectively with people from diverse backgrounds. Manish’s successes have been a key contributor to creating a new industry-funded project to expand the use of AI in the cotton breeding program. Manish has engaged with Cotton Seed Distributors and the broader scientific community as a regular presenter at AACS conferences. He has many ideas for expanding his work to other areas, such as the quantification of foliar disease symptoms, and his continued success will be of great benefit to the cotton breeding program and the industry as a whole.