Increasing crop productivity is a challenge as old as human history. Advancements in technology have allowed farmers to produce ever-increasing amounts of food on a given amount of land. With the world's population expected to reach roughly nine billion by 2050 (United Nations 2013), the demand for food will require increasingly improved methods of agricultural production. One of these potential methods is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to monitor crop health and identify potential issues. This thesis will explore how current stakeholders plan to utilize this technology and the perceived value they believe it will deliver across the various phases of the crop cycle. This thesis begins by reviewing modem precision agriculture management practices and discussing how remote sensing plays a role in improving the efficiency of these types of farming methods. It also identifies a number of challenges facing the industry to include the impact of current regulations on the market. This thesis develops a stakeholder value network that clarifies the tangible and intangible value exchanges between the focal organization and its stakeholders. As well as constructing an OPM (Object Process Methodology) model to describe the system and demonstrate the stakeholder interactions and system process and sub-process decomposition. It also provides visual display of how the value is delivered across these processes. The final aspect of the research for this thesis is to identifies the lead users for these systems and determines how they measure the value of the data provided by UAVs for remote sensing and crop management decisions in support of farming operations. The value proposition for the various crop phases and the ideal uses cases discussed by lead users in this thesis may be used to guide future research in agriculture technology development, and drive further innovation in the emerging field of commercial unmanned aerial system use.

The FAO-ITU E-agriculture strategy guide (available at http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5564e.pdf) is actively being used to assist countries in the successful identification, development and implementation of sustainable ICT solutions for agriculture.The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, and connected analytics has great potential to support and address some of the most pressing problems faced by agriculture in terms of access to actionable real-time quality data. Goldman Sachs predicts that the agriculture sector will be the second largest user of drones in the world in the next five years. Sensor networks based on the Internet of things (IoT) are increasingly being used in the agriculture sector to meet the challenge of harvesting meaningful and actionable information from the big data generated by these systems. This publication is the second in the series titled E-agriculture in action (2016), launched by FAO and ITU, and builds on the previous FAO publications that highlight the use of ICT for agriculture such as Mobile technologies for agriculture and rural development (2012), Information and communication technologies for agriculture and rural development (2013) and Success stories on information and communication technologies for agriculture and rural development (2015). The ultimate aim is to promote successful, scalable, sustainable and replicable ICT for agriculture (ICT4Ag) solutions.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.

DRONE TECHNOLOGY This book provides a holistic and valuable insight into the revolutionary world of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The book elucidates the revolutionary and riveting research in the ultramodern domain of drone technologies, drone-enabled IoT applications, and artificial intelligence-based smart surveillance. The book explains the most recent developments in the field, challenges, and future scope of drone technologies. Beyond that, it discusses the importance of a wide range of design applications, drone/UAV development, and drone-enabled smart healthcare systems for smart cities. It describes pioneering work on mitigating cyber security threats by employing intelligent machine learning models in the designing of IoT-aided drones. The book also has a fascinating chapter on application intrusion detection by drones using recurrent neural networks. Other chapters address interdisciplinary fields like artificial intelligence, deep learning, the role of drones in healthcare in smart cities, and the importance of drone technology in agriculture. Audience The book will be read and consulted by a range of industry engineers involved with introducing drone technology to their daily operations.

In April 1991 BusinessWeek ran a cover story entitled, "I Can't Work This ?#!!@ Thing," about the difficulties many people have with consumer products, such as cell phones and VCRs. More than 15 years later, the situation is much the same-but at a very different level of scale. The disconnect between people and technology has had society-wide consequences in the large-scale system accidents from major human error, such as those at Three Mile Island and in Chernobyl. To prevent both the individually annoying and nationally significant consequences, human capabilities and needs must be considered early and throughout system design and development. One challenge for such consideration has been providing the background and data needed for the seamless integration of humans into the design process from various perspectives: human factors engineering, manpower, personnel, training, safety and health, and, in the military, habitability and survivability. This collection of development activities has come to be called human-system integration (HSI). Human-System Integration in the System Development Process reviews in detail more than 20 categories of HSI methods to provide invaluable guidance and information for system designers and developers.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Delft University of Technology, 2004.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.