Major Melinda and Bill Gates Grant for Mwebaze

PhD student of Computer Science Ernest Mwebaze has been awarded a $500,000 grant by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation in the framework of the Program for Emerging Agricultural Research Leaders (PEARL).The investigation of machine learning based methods for the automated detection and classification of viral plant diseases is a central aspect of the project. The grant includes hardware, software development, training costs, logistics and technical support.

The four-year research project entitled Automated mobile survey technology and spatial modeling of viral cassava diseases in Uganda was proposed by E. Mwebaze (Makerere University, Uganda) as principal investigator, together with senior researchers Prof. Michael Biehl (University of Groningen), Dr. John Quinn (Makerere University, Uganda) and Prof. Christopher Gilligan (University of Cambridge, UK).