The dynamics of life is a fascinating puzzle unfolding at multiple scales. Biological systems involved in perception and behavior also underlie our ability to grasp meaning from the world. They amaze me by their robustness in sensing their environment, for example, for photosynthesis or vision, and they inspire me to develop new technologies and discover new scientific perspectives on animals, plants and microbes in their respective ecosystems. I currently develop artificial intelligence and robotic systems to help people manage micro-farms. Farmers and plant biologists are both experts at growing plants although they rarely exchange their knowledge. I aim at bringing them together around new technologies so that their knowledge can be transferred. I design new hardware to intervene on crops and acquire in-field data. These data are then integrated through mathematical modeling to get a useful description of the field and to point the farmer to the possible actions he can take. I also hope to surprise biologists and farmers about how machines might teach them about the biology of wild plants.
Selected Publications
Colliaux, David, and Remi van Trijp., The discourse of the French method:
making old knowledge on market gardening accessible to machines and humans.,
Computational humanities research conference (2024).
Colliaux, David, Pietro Gravino, Peter Hanappe, Julian Talbot, and Pascal
Viot., Models for the Computational Design of Microfarms., In International Confer-
ence on Complex Computational Ecosystems, pp. 121-132. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023.
Colliaux, David, Jonathan Minchin, Sebastien Goelzer, and Peter Hanappe.,
Computational agroecology: should we bet the microfarm on it?, In Eighth Workshop
on Computing within Limits. 2022.
Colliaux, David, and Peter Hanappe., LettuceThink: A open and versatile robotic
platform for weeding and crop monitoring on microfarms., EFITA (2017).
Colliaux, David, T. Wintz, and P. Hanappe., Bringing phenotyping to the farm:
An evaluation of 3D reconstruction of plants in outdoor environment., Communication présentée à l’International Conference on Computer Vision, Venise, Italie, 2017.