Agriculture can reap better results with use of ICT
The firstever national conference on Information and Communication
Technology for the agricultural sector in Sri Lanka was a groundbreaking
initiative which sought possibilities in integrating modern software
technology with the local agricultural industry.
The conference was held at the Information Technology Faculty of the
Moratuwa University on July 16. It was organized by the Information
Technology Research Unit of the Faculty of Information Technology
jointly with the Agriculture Faculty of the Ruhuna University and the
Agricultural Economic Association-Sri Lanka with the strategic
sponsorship of Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri
Lanka. The conference was an initiative by Prof. Mangala de Zoysa of the
Ruhuna University and Prof. Asoka Karunananda of the Moratuwa University
to establish a research collaboration between the two universities.
The conference helped identify the use of ICT for agriculture as a
timely need of the country. It was recognized that although there are
some ICT initiatives in agriculture in Sri Lanka, they are scattered and
unknown to many. The need for service integration in agriculture has
been recognized.
It was pointed out that modern software agent technology can be used
for service integration, thereby opening access to the knowledge of
agriculture regardless of the ICT literacy of the parties concerned.
There was also a demonstration on the use of agent technology for
service integration in agriculture by a final year student of the
Faculty of Information Technology Salinda Adikari.
The panel discussion revealed that agriculture projects requiring ICT
can be initiated via undergraduate and postgraduate projects in the
university system. The relevance of mobile technologies over the
computers was also highlighted along with the need for the use of local
languages for communication in the domain of agriculture by Prof. Gihan
Dias.
Prof. Epasinghe was Chief Guest of the event. Guests of Honour were
Prof. Malik Ranasinghe and Prof. Susirith Mendis. |
