In a world with great challenges in food security, optimising cereal production is critical. Cereals are the most important food source for human consumption. The fourth important cereal worldwide after wheat, rice and maize, is Barley, and its production strongly depends on fertilization treatments. The adoption of suitable fertilizer management strategies often results in large economic benefits to producers. However, determining optimal fertilizer doses for a specific barley variety is complex. The collection of data and their analyses can be cost prohibitive for small farmers regarding time and money. This paper introduces an approach to support producers with automatic tools for the analysis of fertilization management of barley. The proposed methodology aims to simultaneously estimate nitrogen fertilization and barley yield, from information derived from aerial RGB images captured by a UAV. Our long term goal is to provide a low-cost and wide-are-coverage solution for the estimation of barley variables that can be leveraged to increase barley yield without increasing costs. A low-cost UAV is used to capture RGB crop field images. Then, a deep convolutional neural network is used for the automated extraction of features from the images. Extracted features are feed into predictive models that estimate the variables of interest. Experimental results reveal that the proposed methodology is able to reach an accuracy above 83% when estimating nitrogen fertilization and a high correlation and low RMSE in the estimation of yield in grams. Experimental results are promising and will pave the way for the development of deep learning methods for barley analysis from aerial imagery that can be accessed by the average farmer.

The large amounts of data used nowadays have motivated research and development in different disciplines in order to extract useful information with a view to analyzing it to solve difficult problems. Data mining and machine learning are two computing disciplines that enable analysis of huge data sets in an automated manner. In this paper, we give an overview of several applications using these disciplines in education, particularly those that use some of the most successful methods in the machine learning community, such as artificial neural networks, decision trees, Bayesian learning and instance-based methods. Although these two areas of artificial intelligence have been applied in many real-world problems in different fields, such as astronomy, medicine, and robotics, their application in education is relatively new. The search was performed mainly on databases such as EBSCO, Elsevier, Google Scholar, IEEEXplore and ACM. We hope to provide a useful resource for the education community by presenting this review of approaches.