Document type News item from UQAM
Author : Jean-François Ducharme
Preview: The new Research and Innovation Chair in Animal Welfare and Artificial Intelligence was launched on April 19. Co-directed by Computer Science Department Professor Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo and McGill University animal science Professor Elsa Vasseur, the chair aims to promote longevity and animal welfare on dairy farms through use of remote sensing and artificial intelligence. "We could, for example, detect lameness or other diseases using cameras, or establish correlations between ear movement, facial inspection and the animal's welfare," says Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo.
Endowed with a sum of $5 million, the Chair will work primarily on a major project called "WELL-E", a living digital laboratory focused on the needs of animals and dairy farmers. The project will first be implemented on two pilot research farms - the farm at McGill University's Macdonald Campus in Montreal and a farm in Ontario - and will then be extended to a network of more than 100 farms in Canada. The project is funded by NSERC's Alliance program and PROMPT, project overseen by the Ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie, Québec, with substantial contributions from industry partners Novalait, Dairy Farmers of Canada, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, Les Producteurs de lait du Québec, and Lactanet. [...]Non-invasive indicators
[...] "We would like to be able to develop non-invasive indicators based solely on cameras, algorithms and databases," says Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo.
One of the challenges of this project will be to process a large volume of information, both from producer databases and from data acquired in real time, in order to create a dynamic continuous monitoring environment.
News item leading to an article in Canadian Grocer on April 20, 2023: Quebec universities to research how technology could help improve cow welfare
